The Invisible Pyramid

I seem to have this skill of stumbling upon the weirdest books at second-hand shops that grapple with our place in the cosmos. Here are some bits of poetic language from my recent find, The Invisible Pyramid:

"time glimpsed through a blowing curtain of dust"
"Man himself is the solitary arbiter of his own defeats and victories"
"compulsive vertigo of vast distance and even more endless time"
"I dream deeper, slipping back like a sorcerer through the wood of time"
"We no longer stare at the stars or think of the unreal. Do not repeat this. I think we are animals."
"Indeed the cloud itself was symbolic. It represented time in inconceivable quantities--time, not safe, not contained in Christian quantity, but rather vast as the elemental dust storm itself."
"a silence so profound, a silence so complete that the soul feels penetrated by a sort of religious terror."
"Man cannot restore the body that once shaped his mind."

"Out of a spoken sound, man's first and last source of inexhaustible power, would emerge the phantom world which the anthropologist....calls culture. Its bridges, towers and its lightnings lie potential in a little globe of grey matter that can fade and blow away on any wind."
"A name is prison, God is free"
"To speak of man as 'mastering' such a cosmos is about the equivalent of installing a grasshopper as Secretary General of the United Nations."
"Nature gambles, but she gambles with constantly new and altering dice."
"the flaw is in the vessel itself"
"Infinite love cannot be expressed in finite room. Yet it must be infinitely expressed in the smallest moment...Only so is it in both ways infinite."
The price of living:
"It is, though overlooked, the discontinuity beyond all others: the separation both of the living creature from the inanimate and of the individual from his kind. These are star distances."
Captain Ahab: "All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad."
Buddhist saying: "Thou canst not travel on the path before thou hast become the path itself."
"Men may....use beautiful or deathly machines and yet have no true time sense, no tolerance, no genuine awareness of their own history. By contrast, the balanced eye, the rare true eye of understanding, can explore the gulfs of history in a night or sense with uncanny accuracy the subtle moment when a civilization in all its panoply of power turns deathward."
"...because with understanding arise instruments of power, which always spread faster than the inventions of calm understanding."

I'll keep updating this post as I read!

Keeping it Snappy

As someone who is predisposed to an unhealthy amount of self-analysis, here are some of the things I consider to drive away the fear/anxiety and keep the studio practice spritely:

Joy gives you power.

My variety of painting is like any necessary human expression such as singing or dance.

Fuck it.

It's about play, so how are you getting so down about it?

I know I've made something worth saving before. It will happen again. Have faith.

You are totally freaking free!! This is your chance to make real all or any of those things bouncing through your skull.

Don't be impatient. Let the painting reveal itself to you through the ACT of painting, not just in THINKING about it.

Judgements you make don't need to carry so much positive or negative weight. This is from a part of you concerned with illusory ideas of success/failure. As long as you're thinking of those ideas, you certainly won't make a good painting!

Ann Coxon Quote

"The art of 'falling without hurting yourself' is about developing a skill. It is about letting go of rigidity and inhibitions, making a statement, a leap, yet landing scathed. For an artist, this translates as learning to be confident in one's ability to express oneself, remaining strong despite the vulnerability of continually revealing inner thoughts, desires, feelings or motivations. From then on, it's about making a habit of creating, continuing to develop and to 'hang in there' day to day."

-Ann Coxon from her book on Louise Bourgeois