power of h Weblog

Sometimes strange visions appear. I was working on a collage of a young woman when the image of my daughter appeared. I was knocked out.

I lived in Belgium for four years. Belgium is the tiny neighbour between the Netherlands and France. It is part of the lowlands, mostly a swamp until these hardy people dug the sea out of their gardens. When I was working on this piece I was reminded that when women were gazing pensively out a window it meant that they were thinking about a man who had left or sinking into melancholy over a child who would never return.

I tried to imagine two images that were so inherently incompatible. I thought of fish and window and put them together.

Some men are beautiful… For a while. It is a kind of mix of boyishness and a young woman. If you see pics of Rudolf Valentino, you can see it. And early pictures of Jim Morrison (of the Doors – before he started drinking). Orlando Bloom in Lord of the Rings and Troy. I think it may be where the idea of a Prince Charming comes from.  They are not physically threatening. And yet they are appealing.

What evolutionary advantage is there to anxiety. A certain amount of worrying forces you to plan, to prepare yourself for future difficulties. But what does anxiety do, worrying about things that are not even clear in your own mind. My mother has spent most of her life in a state of anxiety.

I read that the grizzly bear, a bear which has no reason to be afraid of any of the beasts in the forest has a habit of looking over his shoulder. As if he expected trouble. There was a huge bear (about the size of an elephant), now extinct, which roamed the North American continent. It is thought that the fear of this great bear has been passed through the genes to generations of grizzly bears.

Why do we keep looking over our shoulder?

I began a series of collages that I called Black Tops. Mostly because they were done on a black background. Black makes things more dramatic. It makes you want to read into the image. Perhaps thats why the ancients, staring at the night sky, found images there. And named them.

This collage, Balance of Nature, is about the balance of freedom and torture, pleasure and pain, beauty and death. There is of course no such balance in nature. Nature does not have an ethical or aesthetic context. It is what it is. Sharks are no more evil than dolphins. A rose is no more beautiful than a spider. Beauty, freedom, evil. It’s all inside us.