Re: One Oscar and Only One Oscar LO25619
Sajeela wrote:
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Andrew beloved,
Are you saying you are leaving the list serve? Because there are too few
free spirits? I only read your posts anymore, so I have no idea what goes
on there. Somehow I lost interest with all the egos going back and forth,
yatayatayata. But I know this OL Community means a lot to you, so it must
be something quite deep if I have read the situation correctly. Maybe I
have got it all wrong. In any case, it is you that I love, and not the
list serve. It is to you that I shall always remain faithful, my mystical
artistic and soulful friend.
[snip by Host]
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Dear Sajeela,
I have a copy of I believe a very rare photograph of Vincent van Gogh
around 1887/8. I have never seen it reproduced anywhere except in the one
place where I found it. We can all, I would think bring out from our
memory one of his paintings, lets say 'Starry Night'...and that
sentimental old seventies song that goes with it....what were the
colours...Oh yeh! Blue and grey. Which I wonder is the greater miracle for
you Sajeela, that he painted it or that your can recall it right now upon
the press of my typed out words and perhaps with some effort even
enumerate each swirl, star and spire? I think, for what it's worth that
the miracle of his painting is within you.
It is often in the longing to belong that we get lost, truly lost. What
else is academy, ethnocentrism, nationalism and racism? I have quite by
chance and via a totally creative adventure with a little boy teacher who
lives by some enchanted lake some text that means a lot to me this
morning...not because what it says but because it happens to be there, if
you take my meaning? It says this:- that enchantment as symbolic action
upon the cosmos - (our -- writing on the doomsday skin of the universe, --
Hughes :-) must be accompanied by other components of the modern
experiment: democracy, reason and communities. These may be family,
government, polity, church, or university, that can nurture co-operation
and forbearance. Mmmm.
If Sajeela, you could see the space between the reality of the Vincent I
can see in that back and white picture and the reality that others might
see you would see the energies that may become unleashed between that,
perhaps only that, blue and grey.
One purpose to any 'fine art' [and 'learning' is an art for me] may be,
and I paraphrase from the same text page, -- to offer a view that to
perform its cognitive purpose is to reflect critically on the nature of
human existence, which does not present ultimate solutions and
resolutions, but compelling questions, the consideration of which renews
our pact with the future.
Well, there is here through the miracle of technology and the openness of
our host;-) Rick Karash, [who I sometimes see as like old Pere Tanguy who
sold colours to the impressionists in the best kind of reciprocity
possible to him for consideration of their works] the opportunity to share
with you a constancy of vision that sits by me day and night, the vision
of 'the beautiful' mediated by the miracles of all the forms of light, so
take the pictures, take the paper, take the colours, take the inks, take
the pixels, take the subject and object, the ground, the field, take the
stars and the little boy by the lake, take your love for me, and your love
for the world, take your presence and your absence, take the stars in
Rebecca Hawkin's owned night sky, take the rivers in her hair, take the
blue from her eyes, take the ring on her finger, take the flowers in her
hand, take the jewels from her earlobes, take the buds from her dress,
take the beauty of it all and what can you have? And what was there before
you took all that?
Could you, Sajeela, I wonder, conceive of what it would feel, be like, to
be surrounded by a hundred such visions? Mmmmm.
What does the artist say of such a project? " Mozart, Titian, Rembrandt,
Van Gogh, Cezanne each in their own way gave light and healing to the
heaving, living, dying of humanity - this is all that matters in art. If
one person smiles when they see my paintings it is enough, my life has had
meaning and shape." Oct 1993. -
Sit awhile with the image Rick has put up of Rebecca for a while and test
it against the wisdom of a little boy I dialogued with through his
mother's brave and compassionate and loving intervention some years ago,
he was designated to have 'learning difficulties' (sic)...I showed him one
of Len McComb's pictures, a detail of peach or apple blossoms, he said
through his mum that he, - saw angels, and that there was nothing to be
added to the picture nor anything to be taken away. In such learning
difficulties I can see the future. But to get that wisdom, to get that
light, to get that consumate compulsion of unconditional love, you first
have to be willing to break with a convention or two;-) and trust that as
Arendt tells it, one cannot be responsible for what you or another does
with my compulsions;-) freely given;-).
[Host's Note: Andrew, I don't think I have put any picture of Rebecca on
the web for you, but I would be happy to do so. ..Rick]
Is it not the case that in that image sits the entire world? Or should I
say, the potentiality of our world? That work can be made out of love.
Even business may contain more love. Len is after many lonely years now a
very efficient business, alas for the dealers I suspect more than for
himself, a condition Vincent saw and died for.
I am not that interested in talking about this business project or that
business project here. Hell, Sajeela, I think the people who read and write
and think and express here are metaphorically sick to the back teeth of
'business' even LO business when it's just rolling out the rote business as
usual business. One of the cruellest underlying sensations I pick up in this
resonating chamber of thoughts is the fundamental realisation that there is
something to be 'realised' in this loose amorphous project, something fine,
good, noble, worthy, worthwhile, worth making the spare and/or free time and
energy for. Thats the attractor.
But there is something else to set against that great deep 'blue' and that is
the 'grey'. And Oh sajeela, how that grey overcomes our hopes, passions,
projects, lives, thoughts, our very doings. How the hell does one teach
people, invite people to unpick the grey and discover that grey is in colour
theory anyway, the mixing of two complementary opposites, like say orange and
blue? My partial resolution resides in the essence of our own natality. Look
into the fibres of Rebecca's hair, do you not find blue in the orange, and
does it not intensify it? And doesn't the orange intensify the blue? So that
both shine more balanced and bright for the sitting close by in some new
resonation of possible meaning or conveyance (car< carry > caritas). How much
would one have to care to make a painting like that. So many parts to fall
apart but so cohering and so contained, what a richness of picturing. What
else do you need to know apart from what you recreate about the artist and
his subject. Are they fit enough to sit at this table? And if they did, I
want to know this. What would you give them and what would you take? And I
want to know which river would be expended first and which last, giving or
receiving? Or is there the feint possibility that both rivers of give and
take might swerve around and become one continual flow, perhaps in some kind
of dance, so that in reality the one picture moves off the surface and dances
into the next and the next and before you even know it the ocean is in her
hair and her hair in an ocean, and the flowers on her dress are the flowers
of France, and the blue of her eyes is the blue of the starry night and the
stars of the night are the glints in her eyes and the glints in her eyes are
the strange attractor of the moving hands and soul that wove her into the
fabric you now may have become part of by thinking and looking so that
elevating the simple brings both beauty and meaning. To rise up. Is that not
to be born and being borne do we not search for places and people to bear us
up?
The last and first place such a picture exists is not upon the surface at
all, it is within you my dear Sajeela, it is all within you. And it is
all within me too. Where else could 'we' be?
As for leaving, I am nothingnowhereeverywhere except what you will make of
me.
As for Len, he cherished and loved me and anyone and that is my deepest
learning and his deepest leading.
Love,
Andrew
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