Barnett Newman, "Cathedra" (1951) detail.
American Abstract Expressionist artist Barnett Newman produces large-scale, minimalist 'colour fields'. A line passes through the fields of colour in each painting, forming what Newman calls the 'zip'. It is here that the viewer is invited to enter, is drawn into the field or universal space.
Anish Kapoor, Descent into Limbo, 1992
...the void manifests itself as a force field in which materiality becomes immaterial, the solidity of objects is negated by recessive and vanishing spaces, and the finite is punctured with apertures indicating the infinite. Once inside the event horizon of each work, the viewer is invited to reflect closely on the micro-physics of viewing: this yields up a disturbingly intense self-awareness. Kapoor’s works oblige the viewer to become sensitive to the continuous processes of cognition and imagination, instinct and dream, sensation and inference, by which the mind constructs the world. Indeed in such an act of aesthetic response, the mind has a sudden and uncanny experience of looking at itself.
- Nancy Adajania, The Mind Viewing Itself
I need the sea because it teaches me.
– Pablo Neruda
Spending this rainy afternoon preparing for the coming summer by reflecting on the last. These photos where taken sitting in the dunes, staring out into the pacific ocean. If I had swum out in a straight line, the first piece of land I would have set foot on would be South America. The slight swell landing on the shore had travelled thousands of kilometres without interruption; without human recognition. The weather was moving in from behind me, so as each line of cloud dropped it was as if by surprise. Slowly the horizon swallowed the evening light.
Watching the elements intertwine like that is one of those ever-lasting activities. The kind that remind you you are but a speck in the history of time. The kind that make you wonder about all the other beings who have marvelled at the edge of the world before you. The repeating patterns of the world pulse through you. That horizon, whether it is distinct, as in these images, or seeping into itself, is eternally calming. I am so looking forward to spending some time swimming in it this Summer.
Sometimes you come across someone doing something that makes you sigh.
German-Korean musician Isang Enders' rendition of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 within the sacred, charred interior of Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Field Chapel is one of those moments you can't help but wish was quietly, selfishly your own.
It's been a long time since I list picked up a bow and drew it across the strings of my cello. Re-establishing my love for playing that deep, aching instrument has been on my list for quite a while now. But the things that make cellos so human - their size, weight, and equal parts fragility and strength, also make them cumbersome additions to the life of a 25-year old who rents her home and doesn't know where she may move to next.
So in the cello-less meantime, playing the piano in some of my most revered architectural spaces seems like a bucket list worth pursuing. The trick is just going to be getting myself, and the piano, there.
After that, those encompassing forever moments will come easy.
Paris, l'Opera. 2010.
It doesn’t take much. A deserted street at dusk, with the summer sunlight lingering on the upper floors of a row of buildings and the sidewalks down below already deep in shadow, may get some old movie in our heads rolling again. Since we are ordinarily better at forgetting than remembering, it is often a mystery why some such sight has stamped itself on our memory, when countless others that ought to have far greater meaning can hardly be said to exist for us anymore. It makes me suspect that a richer and less predictable account of our lives would eschew chronology and any attempt to fit a lifetime into a coherent narrative and instead be made up of a series of fragments, spur-of-the-moment reminiscences occasioned by whatever gets our imagination working.
- Memory Traps, Charles Simic.NYRB Blog, November 2012.
Paris is, and will likely forever be, my memory trap.
I think it was that way before I had even been there the first time. But it was our second time, although our first together, which hangs in my mind most often these days.
After stashing our bags at the hostel mid-morning, we snuck out and wound our way through the tightly cobbled lanes of the Marais. The air was crisp, with a cool blueness settling over the rooflines. I can't seem to remember anyone else being out. In my mind, the streets were impossibly ours.
Each with a white-specked brioche tucked into a brown paper bags at a quiet boulangerie, we found a place to sit by the canal. The cobbles were warm, and the roughness didn't bother us. Our teenage knees and travel-worn legs dangled. We couldn't help ourselves but to grin.
We were here.
Thanks to the Paris Travel Guide over at A Minute Away from Snowing for bringing it all flooding back.
There is something elusive about spaces which are curated and lived at the same time. We are forever trying to create them, while knowing that in part, they must create themselves.
Of course The Line manage it with quintessential ease in The Apartment: a space for gatherings, launches, and workshops.
Just perfect.
India Hobson via The Garden Edit
It all comes back. Even the dampness underfoot; even that brings it back. I was in Kew Gardens when I first realised how much everything yearns to grow. I was just twelve, quietly sure-footed in the world. Afterwards we went back to the apartment, and it was raining lightly, and I stood in the bathtub with the white curtain pulled around, ran a shower, and shaved my armpits for the first time.
Sometimes, in the evenings, I find it hard not to get lost in The Paris Review - and even harder to find my way back out of the Interviews. There's something about the rich reality of these characters, many of whom have spent years envisaging other characters, which is just so affirming.
Margaret Drabble (with impeccable cashmere and bentwood), 1976
This evening, I have been lounging about with Margaret Drabble. I can't say that I've ever read one of her novels - although I have quickly added some of her classics to my reading list. Towards the end of the interview, she refers to Freud a few times. She's grappling with events, with how the passing of time relates to who you are, and to where you are.
On surprises and familiarities (and a beautiful understanding of mortality):
There's an essay by Freud in which he discusses the uncanny feeling of being both familiar with and utterly surprised by something. I think this is one of the most distressing, but important feelings in life. The feeling that I knew this all along, but I never knew it before. Freud would argue we feel this about sex. The first time we find out what it actually is, we think “how absolutely astonishing and impossible,” but at the same time we know we knew.
I'm sure death feels a bit like that. In fact I've often had a dream in which I am just about to die and my last words are, “Oh, that was what it was like. I did know really, but now I know for real.” And then I wake up.
And on coincidence:
Freud takes a harsher view. His view is that they are coincidences and the idea that our need to see them as not being so, like our need to avoid that death really is death, contorts the whole of human life: that the whole of human culture is distorted by our desperate need to avoid the truth.
I'm perpetually tossed between these two interpretations of life. It is a fact that if you have faith of a certain sort, then certain things will happen for you or for those that you love. But this is only in a way like watering a plant. One of the images I like best is the plant in The Waterfall that Jane keeps on watering long after she thinks that it's dead. And then it begins to grow again.
