Ariel dreams in Never-Everland

Working in the studio the last days has made me realize how many options of vision there are looking at a subject. And how many, but not all, that are appealing to me. I have been working on some landscapes, trying to utilize some industrial manufactured paint I bought some time back in order to overcome some problems related to getting hold of paint in this beautiful but not entirely well-organized and –stocked country consumer-wise, and it has opened some more doors that will be explored in more depth later on. But I am getting ahead of myself. The visions.

What comes out of these exercises is a genuinely felt reluctance to … I am not sure I can call it naturalism, but it might have to do for now. I am not sure why, exactly, but the idea of rendering something as faithfully as one can is in one way deeply appealing and on another hand revolting. Should one not be more than a monitor? I feel a deep need to understand my subject as well as I can, unclutter confusion, looking deeper – but it has all to do with the underlying structure and not surface. Because surface always changes. You see? Surface tells you the quality of the outer layer of things, it being hard and shiny, soft and flurry and shiny and whatever. And sure, it might tell you a lot of stuff. But it is the underlying structure that tells the story that interests me. And then there is light. Colour is never what it appears to be. It is all about light. So, when I am working on a painting portraying Ariel it seems natural to me that her shadowed areas should be in this amazing Ultramarine blue coming from one of those delicious little expensive glass jars bought in a shop in Breschia some time back updated with another found in an equally wonderful artists material shop in Trastevere, Rome, where I used to live and study among other things art history and classical Mythology because this material and the fascinating hue of this particular blue holds a fascination to me beyond colour. You see? But then again, since I feel her so ethereally beautiful and since I try to move beyond my emblematic or symbolic rendering of her features I am for once looking at a picture (my own) to get some details right and I feel I am slipping into this realistic mode which moves me away from what I want to do which is indeed symbolical as I would like to portray her vigilante stance as a young creature of the wild alert, awake, forever vigilant. But, alas. The more I look at that image the more I see the marks of death approaching. And it makes me sad, that I did not see that that day. Not that it might have done some difference. How do you communicate with the inner organs of a sick antelope? Well, that it exactly what I thought I should had been able to do, isn’t it?

Running away from the point again, sorry. So, I work on this portrait which is supposed to be and most certainly is going to end up being an emblematic thing blabla mariane style. And the reality disturbs me. Because it has meaning, it is there, was there, is, in its own way a monument to something in the past. The allure of the photo is that strong. And I do not want to take it in entirely. I want to distance myself from it, using the esthetical elements to get at some kind of understanding of underlying form, shape, structure. But by doing so, and by working using a picture of a small creature I spent time with, waking up in the middle of the night to go feeding and warming and looking after seeing the marks of death but being unable to beat it, this time, makes it different than it being an image of a creature that came to live. It is not guilt. But it is surely sadness there, grief, as well, I suppose. So, I distance myself. Not going in the direction of finding the right streak of grey matching the stripe of long hair coming down her neck as she turns her head towards me from under the drawing table where I have propped her up against my Moroccan cushions and carpets for greater comfort and company as I work. I want to make her eternal. And that means to look beyond. And with what I have. Which these days has as a foundation this industrial paint bought in Karen hardware store in Nairobi. Choosing colours hastily from a chart while a queuing was building up behind me remembering the words spoken by somebody I know to another person I had just met – you must choose the Silk Vinyl! Doing so finding the weight of the pigments lacking making the work a repetitive one which in someways was liberating albeit frustrating after a while when the intended flickering effect did not materialize itself due to the poorness of essence in the pigments chosen for this brand (another story) anyhow, she keeps following me, as I fluctuate between these different modes of relation to her as an image and a soul and I want to make her stronger, braver, healthier, stranger, more familiar, more different, more real, more surreal, more symbol, less cliché, something of meaning. I want her to be a survivor.

I do not know why this is affecting me so much. It is not the death– or is it? I focus on the technical side of it. I guess I could go blue-yellow or green-red or rather purple - cadium. More burnt siena and paynes gray. But it is not right, you see. It is there as I look at it but it is not what I feel. So I struggle. It is like I must always move the things I see one step beyond what is there to see it, to own it as mine or rather it is by moving it that I become intimate with it and it becomes me or I become it.

And when that happens I feel peace. So, perhaps that is what I seek. Peace with it. To have digested it. To have let it become part of me or having given a part of me to it loosing and gaining something at the same time.

So, today, I finished it. It is a time for reflection and a time to let go. There are surely many and better ways to solve the different aspect of it. But, it is what I had in me, now. So I made the choices. And I signed it. And then I posted it. And then I pulled forward another piece that I have not been able to move forward it to make that one another stepping stone on the path that I am making for myself. Because I am going somewhere, see? So I cannot be too fuzzy about delivering up to my own expectations every time. I must allow the process to unfurl. So, here it is. Sure. I could have made the blue more radiant. I could have added more value to the yellows and the pinks. Perhaps I will, one day.

but not today.