Parque Estadual do Rio Vermelho, trees

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Parque Estadual do Rio Vermelho, trees, 28 x 41.5 cm

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parque Estadual do Rio Vermelho, trees, 28 x 41.5 cm

 

 

 

 

 

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Parque Estadual do Rio Vermelho

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Parque Estadual do Rio Vermelho, Woodland, November 

 watercolour on paper, 28.5 x 40.5 cm

 

Parque Estadual do Rio Vermelho, Woodland, November- detail

 

 

This is the largest watercolour I've done this year: I'm very happy about the incremental progress I've made with watercolour over the last three months.

 My technique isn't fancy. But I am beginning to understand how it functions.

 Simple persistence with tasks is so undervalued in life, in general.

 

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Canasvieiras, beach scene

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Canasvieiras, beach scene, watercolour, 38 x 28.5 cm

 

 

 

 

Canasvieiras, beach scene, watercolour, 38x 28.5 cm - detail

 

 

 

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Parque Estadual do Rio Vermelho, clearing

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 Parque Estadual do Rio Vermelho, clearing

 watercolour on paper, 40 x 28.5 cm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parque Estadual do Rio Vermelho, clearing- detail

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parque Estadual do Rio Vermelho, clearing- detail

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This paper is a notch up- it's Canson 300 gsm watercolour paper. It isn't too expensive but it holds the washes well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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My sleep

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Bed

This is from my old place. I had been sleeping in this room for exactly a year

The room is like a cell. I strongly sense how arbitrary it is that I'm here rather than any other room.* 

In fact, since I left my parents house over thirty years ago, I have felt this about where I live: the immense arbitrariness of where I am. Leaving home can be an exile or an escape, or just what you must do as a mature person. But home, by definition, is necessarily a place that can't feel arbitrary. 

I believe these feelings of rootlessness are common among the children of immigrants. Their parents made a choice to move. But the children they have in the new country are neither truly of the new country nor of the country of their parents. The children feel detached from the country they are growing up in, but are not really part of the countries of their parents either. They're in a cultural limbo. Sometimes such children are referred to as Two Culture Kids. They are often the offspring of military or missionary families.

 I think I unconsciously chose the role of landscape painter because that way I could examine and insist on, my presence in the world. 

My Sleep

I wanted to write about my sleep, about what might be going on there, because I haven't had a dream for a long time, not for years, and i guess that might be interpreted as the death or the dying of my unconscious mind. Perhaps, you might argue, I've evolved into this super- conscient being, whose mental workings have no mystery. But the decisions i daily  make or fail to make suggest you would be wrong.

I also wanted to tell you about my bed, but then I started to think about how it would be to see a photograph of myself sleeping and how creepy that would be. To see myself lying asleep would be to see someone vulnerable to attack, their body unwilled, corpse like. Part of what makes that thought appalling is, I confess, that it has a glassy appeal as at times I do indeed wish I could rise out of my own being and see myself a corpse, spent through. That isn't a constant feeling, but can come when life seems wretched. But such trains of thought should be controlled as they may lead to rather unconstructive attitudes to life's problems 

One thing about sleep although its a physical necessity, you can't force it, it has to be voluntary.  The are are two of you, one that declares its bed time. He has to make it as easy for the other part  of you, a younger part, wilful and strange, to concede, to sleep. Sometimes the other part is very easy and goes to sleep. But if they aren't accepting you can't force it.

You choose where to lie, probably a strung or foam padding covered by a sheet of cotton, with one or two further items of raised padding to support your head called pillows.Then, there is a blanket or some sort of cover and you assume a position lying, covered by cloth. Ideally only you head or one arm pokes out of that envelopment.

You're in there, your head rests on the pillow, then you close your eyes and try to ease from your thoughts letting any conflictuous moments from the day float away, and you push away also any hopes or aspirations so you are humble, desire free, and your passage into sleep can proceed without rupture. 

If you think about a girl or some sexy thing then it is better if it is a memory of a successful encounter than a ambition, or you will become quite hopeless thinking about how you might contrive an apparently chance meeting outside the tube stop and where that encounter might lead.

But if that process, that embarkation is overlong and you are still waiting for sleep after a time it is better to return to the state of will and rise,  do ironing or arrange your postage stamp collection, some quiet monotonous task. Myself, have arranged all my bookshelves according to colour of book spine. 

The sleep I want is first  a dense, heavy, almost asphyxiating.  I want to be taken by a landscape by Poussin. I want serpentine paths passing giant oaks and a lazy fisherman sleeping, i want farl green forest and a stillness broken only by a wisp of smoke from a dying campfire.

  I want to be free of the need to make choices, to accept everything. I don't want to know that I might return, I want vastness, lostness , a place without or decision or shame.

This photo was taken about six months ago before I moved. 

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The avenue I walked down

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 The avenue I walked down

 avenue 

 

I came on Sunday. 

I wasn't feeling too well. I had a sad feeling, I felt pointless too. The bad part of Sunday, the mooching around, the irritation, the boredom. 

I had a thought about how thirty years ago I had the same feeling. You might think that one's emotional life would develop over time, so that such negative states no longer affect one. But it seems to me part of the essential misery of life that one never really escapes the treadmill, even after learning that one is within it.

 

 A twig representing how I felt

 

I had passed this avenue on the fast road, an exquisite road with endless, tall dreamlike Scots pine, rising with such heavenly aspiration anyone would feel enchanted there. When I passed this entrance, I always thought, " oh you must stop there one day." I must have had that thought over three hundred times.

And so, I went there with the Lumix camera, a lovely black metal thing that fits snugly in the hand. 

From this entrance you follow a track through woodland, and then, you meet a fenced parking area and a kiosk with sign with bold acronyms, telling you that it pertains to a work-based social organisation of some sort. 

Then, over a sandy path you reach a fine narrow beach and the Atlantic.

 I felt, when I met these facilities somewhat like a trespasser, a bit uneasy. The mood in Brazil has become less laid back lately, even in touristy areas. There`s a sense of suspicion that I feel wasn't present when I came here 16 years ago, and this affects people's behaviours in these areas- you don`t have the sort of ready conversations that you used to- I`m sure I`m not imagining that. Though I must say that the only person I met, a woman with two small children, smiled and said hello in a pleasant way, a way that made me feel all right.

Oh how strange that my sentiments might be moved by such an easy thing as a lady`s smile? What is the point of thinking at all, when ones feelings jump and rise or fall with the predictability of a pin ball on a warped board?

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This is a shell I found lying on the sand-

The shell in my hand

I'm not going to show a picture of the ocean. Imagine it yourself.

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As I drove off, I heard the Velvet Underground song ¬Ocean¬.

I can find two versions of the song, one on an early Lou Reed Album and the other on a posthumous released Velvet Underground compilation called VU. The Velvet Underground version is earlier and more surreal. The song that I heard in my head was the Reed`s solo take and is also intense and troubled. But it is more coherent, with scenes of drowning and desperation, of castles and towers and warlocks - rather Shakesperean. Whether the lyrics have directed meanings or are meant as imagistic poetry is not clear from the commentaries I have found, but I suspect the former. 

 However, it is argued by David Caune on Quora that Malcolm is a reference to the son of Henry Melville, author of Moby Dick. Malcolm`s suicide, a result it is argued, was the result of violent abuse from his father. Lou Reed was subjected to Electroconvulsive Shock Therapy, an attempt by his parents to control his homosexual tendencies, and Caune sees in the song a refence to the trauma that this treatment caused him, which he parallels with that of Melville's son.

Castles glowing at night, towers above outfright

Warlocks decapitating

Malcolm he lives on hate, Serve your brain on a plate

Feasts on your mouth for dinner

The song ends-

Here comes the waves

 

 

Following Caune, these waves might then be waves of ECT therapy. And you hear the music rise into a crescendo, loud and more pain filled, a music which seems to not just describe but glamourise destruction. 

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There was something self-pitying and just plain crappy about how I handled the day.

 But it's just like that sometimes.

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Society of Scottish Artists - two pictures accepted for 130 years of the S.S.A. Annual Exhibition

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These two paintings have been selected for the S.S.A. annual exhibition in Edinburgh.

It runs  from 17 December 2022 to 10 January, 2023.

I will also send in three paintings for their 30 x 30 cm rack.

 

Melipeuco, a road, an itinerant, oil on card, 29 x 23.5 cm

 

Myrtle and Dekalb, oil on card, 16 x 17 cm

 

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