2002

Space and Time evolving into Line and Mass or visa versa.

Nothing is pure anymore.  Everything is contaminated and middle age is all about dealing with  contamination, mine and that of the others. The existentialists talked about “I and the other”….Artist and the model. Mirror exercises.

 “I” can be so divided, complex, and confusing. Binary opposites. Impressionists and Expressionists. Modern, post modern, realists and abstract painters. Surrealists and classical, groups and individuals. Replica of life: no man is an island. We are all mixed up together.

My mirrors are all cloudy. There is anger in the air. I am sick in bed without a care. Selling teapot paintings in the Albaicin.  Painting the Peru Figures and Any Woman with a Pain in her Left Breast.  Lying around in bed reading the newspaper, hoping to cure myself.

Resistance again: Face the wall and remain seated. See what happens, then.  Stains, lines, stains, lines; figure   form   depth.  Surface, lines, wrinkles, buildings, death.

Life is so perfect, it is scary. Painting the Kourous Man, he is stone cold; and The Toro Saliendo del Toril, the wild beast flaming with energy.

TIME and SPACE: my cowardly response to the needs of others, “leave me alone!” Sacrifice and reward.  Sticks and stones may break my bones……

COLOURS AND MEMORY:  You are so intelligent, you bring me down. I can´t remember a name or a town. Black, I am even keel; you do not see anything, but shadows and depth. White, all air and light. Yellow comes flushing in, followed by green drops, and burgundy wine on a winter´s day. Red, so mesmerizing and bloody, blue to cool my whispering mother; brown, a stain I couldn´t do without, orange loves fun, it´s bright, it´s done. Another gray day.

BEYOND TIME AND SPACE:   I am fighting against them and what I really want is to be one, with them. Two concepts which control my life obsessively. We all crave that which is our very existence. –

Leaving one culture, one world space, and coming into another is an absorbing task,like being between magnets, both the South and North Pole pull you. I flew east and the day moved west and we met each other half-way across the Atlantic Ocean.  Was it day or night?

Back home the phone got cut off and the electricity bill is overdue.  Breathing does not come as naturally as one expects: headaches, teeth problems, broken glasses, and a whole lot of money I owe now.

TIME: My enemy? Not me. I am not running; I am with the leaves on the trees. It came, it is here, it is gone. It is never mine. It is all the time. It is not my friend, yet I know her well, she is always here with me, inescapable, unavoidable, undeniably, unintentionally, uncontrollably mine.