“In the past, the painter was looked at askance when he wrote – even if it were letters. He was practically expected to eat with a brush rather than with a fork.”
Tag: Quote
Diary of the Plague Year: Day 8 24 March 2020: more from The Black Notebook
“Blueblacksliding constellations”
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake – before you ask, no I haven’t.
“Thou hast curiously embroidered me”
“Thou hast wrought me up after the finest way of texture, and as it were with a needle.”
“That Augustus had native notes on his body and belly, after the order and number of the stars of Charles’ Wain.”
The Garden of Cyrus
Sir Thomas Browne
“Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so anatomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested – probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven ..”
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
A Diary of the Plague Year: Day 8 24 March 2020: more from The Black Notebook; Vincent
To struggling painters everywhere (and we are always struggling):
“However hateful painting may be, and however cumbersome in the times we are living in, if anyone who has chosen this handicraft, pursues it zealously, he is a man of duty, sound and faithful.”
Vang Gogh
I think Vincent deserves a page to himself.
A Diary of the Plague Year: Day 8 24 March 2020: from The Black Notebook
From the notebook:
Mono no aware
Japanese – “the appreciation of the melancholy transience of the world”
Exhibition with Shelley Found Object– glimpses, residue, time passing, history, silence, enigma.
“The Soul is in the Skin”
Jacques Rivette, film Jean Renoir, Le Patron.
“Chaos must shimmer through the veil of order”
Novalis from Alfred Brendel The Veil of Order.
“He, first of occidentals, has explored the infinite ranges of tones that lie wrapped about the central core of greys. His grays themselves pulsate with imprisoned colours. Years ago I had said of the old Chinese school of coloring, that it conceived of colour as a flower growing out of a soil of greys. But in European art I have seen this thought exemplified only in the work of Whistler.”
Ernest Fellhorn (Orientalist)
THE CREEKSIDE HERMIT 