Brave New World

Picture: From Photowisdom by Lewis Blackwell. © ARNO RAFAEL MINKKINEN

The artist, Arno Rafael Minkkinen says: "When I discovered that the camera would work better without me being behind it, that’s where my work really started. It came out of a process of discovery, which ties in with something I tell students that I teach. I tell them: 'Are you pressing the button because you have seen something you have seen before, or are you taking a risk to make something you haven’t seen?'"

He Said:

I took a picture of a girl on a train platform once. Her idea. I knew we were over but hadn't shared that with her at that point. She was smiling. I was thinking, I'm going to be the reason she stops smiling very soon. I didn't want that to be caught on camera so I said it would look better just her on her own. I hugged her before she boarded and didn't answer any of her calls after the train left the station. Not my proudest moment, just the way I handled breakups then. I think about that picture and wonder if she sees it as our last happy moment, or the last of my lies.

She Said:

I don't like risks. I don't see roller coasters, I see accidents. I don't see mountains, I see avalanches. I don't see wild abandon in the ocean, I see Jaws. Mostly, I tell myself I am being careful and in the words of my mother, better safe than sorry. But then sometimes, I feel sad at the things I miss. I don't mean bungee jumping or an adrenalin junkie's fix. It's the little things. Random acts of bravery. Being true to myself is scarier than jumping out of any plane. So, I waste time aping others, following when I want to be leading. But I guess the responsibility makes me uncomfortable. It's just so much easier when you have someone else to blame. but the road to the new year is always paved with good intentions. This year, I would like to create something, anything, and breathe new life into my dusty existence. But still, I find myself anchored in the past, stuck in time, sometime six years ago I think, when I confessed my raw feelings to a man not knowing how he felt in return. I am totally, insatiably, madly and crazy in love with you, I said. And I meant it too. 2004: The last time I was brave and bold and true. Here's hoping for a recurrence in 2010. What are your resolutions?

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Two Lovers

René Magritte - Two Lovers 1928

This artist was made pop culture famous for his bowler hat painting that got used to such great effect in the movie The Thomas Crown Affair, and I was at a seasonal celebration dinner where an artist wannabe girlfriend was warbling on about him being her favorite artist. She called him a surrealist. I cannot say I share her opinion on either count but I thought I'd use this blog as a forum to explore the taste of others as well as my own.

So, love is blind, we're essentially separate, and yet we yearn to mesh...?

Whatever, there's gotta be much hotter and heavier images for Lovers out there, unless you're the depressive kind. I feel this kind of art should come with Prozac tablets, or pens so you could poke your eyes out later and be done with it. Compare this to Chagall, with his flying ladies and goats and violins, his "Lovers" are so intertwined, girls head on boys chest in a garden...still tame and bit sad but a little less bleak, a little less lets not have identities, hide ourselves and attack the other with our passion. Hmmm, maybe this painting is growing on me.


"Cat Among the Pigeons"

The Fool

The symbolism and compressed details encompassed in the artwork of a typical card in a Tarot deck always fascinates me. I generally like it when art alludes to something else, like in religious imagery, where a rose symbolises Mary mother of Christ and a dove Christ himself, or in moralistic paintings like some of the Pre-Raphaelite art, heavy with imbedded meaning. One of the worlds most famously allusionist paintings, Jan Van Eyck's "The Arnolfini Marriage", where a pair of clogs means domesticity, and a mirror means fidelity or some other such exquisite suggestive signalling always reminds me of something you'd expect to see in the most beautifully rendered Tarot art. This particular deck uses photo collages of real people and the delightful photoshop, and some landscape art, to come up with this new-agey classic interpretation.

Back to The Fool, and Tarot cards, and what bull crap a person will buy into in a desperate attempt to gain some control over the future, or just get a little reassurance over present circumstance. The Fool is card zero in the Major Arcana of a typical Tarot deck, and it's pretty light in terms of refrences to mythology and fiction, but what it stands for is pretty awesome. When it appears in a reading it often indicates a choice to be made, or rather a lack of one, a surrender to someone or something one is irresistably drawn to, illogically almost, a recognition of the soul's desire to merge, the truimph of subconscious desire over rational thought, the former naturally being feminine energy, the latter... quelle surprise... male energy.

The Fool stands for the querent, a new start, a new beginning, and a ceratin rosy outlook to life that may come and bite you in the heiny, (the little dog quite literally furnishes that option). Some serious abandon going on here, and that's the idea behind card zero, indeed the idea behind a whole Tarot reading; the suspension of disbelief, cynicism and all those clever thought based decision making systems, and going with your animal gut, an intangible feeling that this is what you need to do, repercussions be damned, falling off the cliff and into something new, dangerous, and exciting.

At this crossroad of new beginnings, art and intution, I salute the fool in all of you; it's a warning card as well, to open our eyes, watch our step, but still embark on our journey, go, go, go, to where life, and 2010 will take us.

"Cat Among the Pigeons"