Presence & Absence

"Adam" (detail)               RAllen-Sherwood 2016

Some say absence makes the heart grow fonder. But perhaps it was written by a hopelessly romantic soul.

I've been away due to some unforeseen circumstances beyond my control.....but thankfully things are slowly getting sorted. Thus, I am grateful (and relieved!) to be back in the studio again.

Hands, detail

As a warming up exercise to stretch my creative muscles, I attended a life drawing class run by a close friend. These posted images are from that day. I wanted to document and share them because it's not often I find such strong statements of presence and absence in my work. And from life drawing, of all things!

"Adam 4"  ink & brush        RAllen-Sherwood 2016

My guardian deities of Form & Emptiness sit deep at the core of my being, quietly awaiting my next mark.

Art keeps me real.

Shoko Kanazawa

 "Together Alive"        Shoko Kanazawa 2016

In Japanese Shodo (Way of Calligraphy), there is a saying which goes: Kokoro tadashikereba sunawachi fude tadashii— which means loosely "If your mind is correct, the brush will be correct."  The Japanese word 'Kokoro' can also mean 'heart', but sometimes it can mean other things as well, such as mind, spirit and the essence of an individual. It's a big little word.

 

Shoko Kanazawa  2012

In Shodo practice, having a correct mind actually means to become free of conceptualising mind and make marks directly from our true nature. Correct mind means to stay calm, focused and be fully present so that all the brushstrokes come directly from the heart, or kokoro.

If you want to see what that really means, please take a look at acclaimed Japanese calligrapher Shoko Kanazawa in action by clicking right here. 

Images courtesy of  shoko.org/en/index.html

Étienne ét Moi

http://laurastestaardvark.blogspot.co.uk/2008/02/photographing-air.html

I've been looking at the works of a nineteenth century French scientist, biomechanics engineer, inventor and motion photographer named Étienne Jules Marey. His name may not sound familiar but it was Marey's work that served as the foundation for Eadweard Muybridge‘s iconic animal locomotion studies. Marey also directly influenced the development of early cinema. (see links for info) 

Marey's smoke and aether photographs are my personal favourites. They are mysterious and haunting images. The occupation with making the invisible visible, took up the latter part of his life. He dedicated his last few years to documenting movements of air. When asked why it was so important Marey stated in  La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales (1878), "This method allows observing and measuring the "relation of space to time that is the essence of motion"  

Nereid Running  (reversed)    R Allen-Sherwood

The similarity in our interests kindles a feeling of familiarity. Of something known, even though it is unknown. But the real "aha!" moment came when, on a hunch, I reversed or inverted one of my black and white Nereid images, and placed it.next to his photo and..... voilà!  A perfect doppelgänger - aetheristically speaking, of course. 

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne-Jules_Marey
http://www.robinsonlibrary.com

Musee D'Orsay

Chinese Silence

The Relaxation Channel          You Tube 2015

The book entitled: “In Praise of Blandness” written by French sinologist and scholar Françoise Jullien is an elegant treatise on the Chinese perspective of “blandness”, as seen through the wide lenses of Daoism, Confucianism, Chinese aesthetics and the classical literature and prose of the Sung and Tang Dynasties. Although here the author chooses "blandness” as the translated term for his essay, in truth it can also be interchanged (some of the time) with similar words such as; emptiness, nothingness, void, space and so on.

Although it’s a slim manual, it’s not exactly light reading. Many times I’ve had to go back over some passage again and again, in order to get the gist of it. It can be hard work, but the rewards I’ve gained more than make up for it. The following is but one example of some of the treasures that I’ve found, in a chapter called “The Blandness of Sound”  Jullien writes: 

     “Such then, is the bland sound: an attenuated sound that retreats from the ear and is allowed to simply die out over the longest possible time. We hear it still, but just barely; and as it diminishes, it makes it all the more audible that soundless beyond into which it is about to extinguish itself. We are listening, then, to its extinction, to its return to the great undifferentiated Matrix. This is the sound that, in its very fading, gradually opens the way from the audible to the inaudible and causes us to experience the continuous movement from one to the other. And as it gradually sheds its aural materiality, it leads us to the threshold of silence, a silence we experience in plenitude, at the very root of all harmony”.

So, the next time you are deeply absorbed in a sublime piece of music, see if you can hear that soundless beyond that carries each audible note simultaneously in its manifestation and in its extinction. Maybe ultimately, both silence and sound are one and the same! At least on the meta meta level of all things, I guess.

 

I'll bet you John Cage knew this all along!

Cageian Space

John Cage tv interview                          Photo R. Allen-Sherwood 2014

Happy New Year everyone. With the start of the new year I've been re-organising my living spaces and came upon my university research file on artists who, like myself, were inspired or influenced by karesansui or Zen gardens. It was like finding a long lost friend!

                  John Cage tv interview  Ryoanji garden                    R Allen-Sherwood 2014                  

One artist who takes up a goodly chunk of the file is the late, great John Cage. His one-of-a-kind musings on sound, silence, space and life continue to inspire me to this very day. Cage also loved Zen gardens and they influenced his work for much of the later part of his life.

  

Ryoanji music score    www.soundstation.dk

Laura Kuhn from the John Cage Trust describes his first encounter with Ryoanji Zen Garden:

"Cage first visited the Ryoanji Temple and its early 16th-century rock garden in 1962, during a concert tour of Japan (Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Sapporo) with David Tudor, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Yoko Ono.

Measuring 30 x 10 meters, the garden consists of carefully raked white pebbles with 15 rocks arranged seemingly at random.  Over a period of ten years, the last decade of his life, Cage devoted himself to drawings addressing the aesthetic order of the complex that is revered in Japan as a perfect depiction of nature".

Courtesy of John Cage Trust

I chose several of his "R= Ryoanji" drawings for my undergraduate dissertation on  Space, Form and Emptiness:The Influence of Japanese Zen Rock Gardens on Eastern andWestern Art.  It was

 a hit as many people did not know he was also a visual artist as well as music composer.

www.discogs.com

In 2016 I am looking forward finding more space/mind changers in my continuing investigations into the meaning of space, self and nothingness Hi ho Silver! 

5000 Thankyous

Visitors to this blog have passed the 5000 mark and still counting. Thank you so very much! Hope you are all having a lovely holiday over Christmas and here's a special spatial toast to a happy, safe and healthy 2016 for all of us.

Cheers & Happy New Year!

Photo courtesy of  Fox News magazine

Cascadia

GoPro: Danny MacAskill - Cascadia                  Courtesy of GoPro & YouTube

Sometimes navigating space requires skill, coordination, balance and one helluva set of cojones 

Meet Danny MacAskill, the David Belle of BMX (my take).   Don't watch if you have any fear of heights....