N. M. in the Coffeehouse The great writer of stories sat in his favourite café. He sipped his coffee and smoked a cigarette while reading the daily newspapers. His famous dark glasses reflected and caught the heavy air of amber light flooding in from the window next to him. Now and then he would lift his head and observe the bustling living life on the street outside. It manifested before him like a scene straight out from one of his novels.
INVINCIBLE FLOWERS II ANNAKARINAJEANNEMOREAUJANEBIRKINANNEWIAZEMSKYSILVANAMANGANO...
THE MUSE AND THE MOON – Inspiration Recovered
Inspiration lies just outside the edge of haloed light. Here, invisible forces radiate to slowly awaken the sleeping eye of the mind. For a long time, the Artist waits for the elusive, silent Muse to arrive; looking at the night sky like a somnambulist caught in an intermediate zone, between the glow and energy of the cosmos and the anticipation of the inevitable encounter with the Muse.
The collection of works, titled THE MUSE AND THE MOON, negotiates two terrains that delve into the nature of creativity and the source of authentic inspiration.
To prove my affirmation of the truth in art, my personal quest is to transpose the clues and messages from within me that come from outside time. Artists hold on to messages that wait for their creative release and anticipate the creative force that brings new things into existence, to materialise/re-materialise in the world.
If these things come from an undefined and invisible void for creative decisions to be made, they do so with a sense of recovered inspiration. A deeper insight forms and what is found there is the light that was never forgotten, never extinguished by the fallibility of memory. The light of the Moon shines on the Muse from inside absolute time, from where the Muse was first encountered and is here re-born again.
THE FIRST TOPOS
The first topos/τόπος – as in place – from where our desire to express our original essence comes, is the indeterminate, but sensed condition that inflicts unease over the spirit and grazes against the Artists’ existential seeking.
The first revelatory experience that has remained within me – truly a dormant splendour – and has resurfaced here in these paintings many years later, occurred in the Greek countryside of my father’s formative years.
On a hot summer’s night alive with nocturnal insects hovering in the night sky, I saw the Moon, its glorious yellow brightness dazzling my eyes. I had never seen a Moon as large and full as this, or as radiant. It seemed so close I could make out tracks of lunar markings on its surface. And like the one I have painted here, MOON WITH NIGHT SKY – so solid in its mosaic night – almost at arm’s reach, but with an ephemerality that made you breathless lest it vanish before your very eyes. I came to realise with some astonishment – during the process of painting – that this image from my past was where the nucleus for these paintings could be located (even though I knew nothing of this when I began painting them). The fluid connection never lost, never abandoned inside life’s vortices. If I was surprised by the Greek Moon then, I know now that it was also a bridge to the present, it is hard to see how it could be otherwise, considering my painting MOON WITH NIGHT SKY signals back to it (the Greek Moon) today and has, without doubt, transfigured my consciousness. All that was needed for this dynamic inspiration to be stimulated to artistic fruition was the Muse. And the Muse found me waiting.
THE SECOND TOPOS
The second revelatory encounter and the second topos/τόπος, was in a place of homage, where the ego vanishes to enable the soul to speak and ascend. This transpired the very first time I laid eyes on a photograph of Constantin Brancusi’s LA MUSE ENDORMIE. The ego is humbled, and the voyage has begun in earnest...
The initial impulse for these paintings materialised a long time ago – now out of time – but their realisation was born from a real desire to capture the Muse in flight before I lost her, before she dissolved in the glow of the Moon. It is a poetic effort to express an intuition. It is also a poetic effort to go seek and awaken the sleeping Muse.
If Brancusi’s Muse in repose has left an indelible mark on my paintings and my psyche, it is with adoration that I present her here in his spirit, interpreted with a new vision and respectfully accepting Art’s generosity.
A fortuitous encounter many years ago with an image that has the weight of phenomenal beauty, and no respite from it. Here she is, a visible force that creates a dynamic presence in my studio, or one can say, the evocation of lost time regained.
Gazing at MUSE ENTERS THE STUDIO (ARRIVAL), I can discern on her face the glow of my night-watch in her semi-sleep.
The “moment of truth” had arrived, as they say, the very reason these paintings exist today.
A Red Sky at morning, pushing against an absolute Sky Blue, the chromatic chrysalis of a new day, then, the world shook in seismic devotion. 5.VIII.2020
THE MUSE AND THE MOON
In semi-sleep the Muse rests her head against polychromatic spaces, waiting for the Moon to appear in her many enigmatic guises. Meanwhile, the Artist waits...waits to make visible the miracle of Art. VIII.2019
The strong blue sea with a solitary caique on it.
the miracle of painting to see the afterimage that has already taken it’s place already transforming into memory free-falling towards a distant and invisible future 11.VII.19
INVINCIBLE FLOWERS I ISABELLEADJANIDOMINIQUESANDAMONICAVITTIFANNYARDANT...
Skimming the same stone on the same endless sea. I.XXV.MMXIX
EDEN RECLAIMED
Behold the lunar kingdom! Revel in the unreality of this majestic view before us, for we sit on top of the world!
We reached out to the sublime vista with our beauty seeking eyes and saw the advancing light charging towards us through the air-sea flux.
The remarkable blue-orange-violet panorama awash in a transparency of vaporous and merging tints immersed us in a show of Auroral splendour.
Like two souls relinquishing their spirit in the open air for all to see – we were enveloped completely – our skin radiating a coloured light.
Tonight, in her sunset vividness, Thira was made up of all this and more. A magic carpet ride above the white domes and maze of streets below.
What comes to mind now – as it did then on that glorious month of July – is a mysterious city rising up from the sea, transposed from the perfume laden pages of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and shades of Scheherazade, of escapades, oud melodies, desert heat and nocturnal flights amid the stars.
As the sun submerged below the horizon-line we were witness to a combustion of metals tracing the sky’s skin in a visual display of trembling light.
In a boundless void – as if in a confined domain of scintillating particles of air – Thira was encased under a Bell jar.
The merging sea and sky was unsurpassed by anything seen or remembered before, painted with accents of Tyrian purple, Murex blue, diffuse yellow-orange glow and mirages of Dianthus and Cerise.
We inhaled all of it in and let it settle on our dark skin, and on our eye lashes remained the lingering dust of an antique world.
We have become one with the evocation of creation itself as it must have been aeons past. An impossible image, a dream, from where no words can truly describe the First Eden.
A silent mystery reclaimed – just in time – caught in the nets of our personal awakening, only to recede back from whence it came – like always – leaving us with a state of mind which may lead us, if we have within us a clarity of vision, to life’s unexpected mysteries and pleasures.
We reached out into the eye of the precipice – mindful of the certain fall if we abandoned our resistance to the pull and vertigo of the withdrawing sun – towards a renewing of memory to re-connect the traces of a lost paradise within ourselves.
All we desired then – in the halcyon days of our travels – was to ascend Thira’s many domes and climb stealthily to the top in order to see the day’s ending explode into sunset. Like thieves in the night, prowling like stray cats on top of the world, stealing Thira’s twilight offering.
Barcelona 17.VIII.2017, oil and typeface on paper, 21 x 29.5cm
SOLEIL D'EGYPTE For an afternoon I bring Egypt into my hot studio. Voyage sur le Nil en Egypte. Summer MMXVII
Muse, oil on paper, 21 x 29.5cm, artists' book sheet, DAPHNIS AND CHLOE by Longus
Reflections on Domes & Other Signs
Come, my friends, ‘tis not too late to seek a newer world. ALFRED LORD TENNYSON Ulysses
As far as I’m aware, the genesis of all of these paintings can be traced to what I perceive to be the visible colour spectrums set off by natural and celestial phenomena. Arising from this idea is the question of omnipotent light as a spiritual manifestation, and it is from this premise I seek to bring down the light. And if this idea challenges the pragmatic thinker, as I hope it will, all I have to offer are these silent visual codes, not to distance the viewer, but to help create possible meanings.
What is noticed around me by the amazed eye will eventually - with quiet reflection inside the studio – be filtered through my own sensibility, in order to find a way toward the construction of a different world.
The Domes & Other Signs series has become over time a continually expanding theme, encompassing a variety of pictorial effects and classical references to express, or more precisely, to unravel a complex visual inquiry, namely the metaphoric transcription in paint of the artist’s response to his creative self.
My visits to the Greek islands over the years have nourished my Islomania, and it is here on these mythical shores the visual references for my paintings were first noted.
It is the incandescent charge of alertness to atmospheric realities around me and my engagement with the nuances of colour and the quality of light that is presented in this series of pictures.
On Santorini, Hydra, Patmos or Chios I become totally immersed in summer’s luminosity, and in tune to what the writer Lawrence Durrell refers to as the spirit of place.
Here I have occasion to admire the vernacular architecture and bring it into my paintings.
As the viewer can see, Domes have an important role to play in my art. For me, they are an architectural surface to harness strange nebulae and celestial radiance. A way to communicate with the Universe perhaps?
On these islands, Beauty observed has a strange anxious character: it has irrationality and mystery (the sea), and a classical perfection too precise to be real (antiquity). It unfolds its frayed edges, threatens us with danger from its shadows at noon (Pan’s hour), and offers us, finally, hope and freedom in the all consuming light (the celebratory poems of Odysseus Elytis).
As an observer, you cannot overlook the ancient world converging seamlessly with contemporary life.
When something tangible materialises - out of stillness/stasis - on the canvas, I’m truly astonished: the stirring of colour is as real as a new Eden.
A strange metamorphosis begins to occur: the appearance of the sky alchemically materialises into a Roman mosaic, hovering like an abstract heaven above the clouds, above the sea of deep-turquoise splendour...
or
An afterglow of antique-gold turns into a Byzantium sky and the signs of beauty floating beneath it are miraculously revealed: clouds, sea, the colour-struck domes...
Gold-foil a shimmering reflection on an imaginary green sea...
What has been put down in pigment, mixed with refined linseed oil (all three materials used: paint/oil/fabric, are made from earthly substances), is an evocation of a sky, and somewhat illusory, for it is a sky purely of my imagination. In my own way, I have sought to translate in paint the architecture of light and the inner light of the self.
Domes & Other Signs are in spirit about constructing light, or, the poetry of light. The cupolas – with or without crosses – have the illusory quality of being other worlds; a threefold metaphor representing:
this world visible
the world that has already been and gone in the blinking of an eye
the new world of our own inspiration and creation that is forthcoming
They are suspended in silence and are enshrouded with a patina of mystery against a background of unique stillness - the Japanese spirit of wabi comes to mind. They are as complete as I can make them.
Also, I should mention, these lunar abstractions are the same ones you can sit on to watch the breathtaking sunsets on the Aegean island of Santorini.
Finally, the Domes series reflect my poetic stance as an affirmation in favour of beauty, and, more importantly, the imagination, where positivity and humanity – when permitted – can coincide respectfully.
I hope that these paintings on display for SALA 2015 help enrich the viewer’s visual experience through a personal engagement with the world around them, and offer a semblance of spiritual calm that transcends the physical and cultural chaos of the contemporary world.
SYROS Was it really Syros we passed in the night, or the Scales of the Mermaid tremulous in our wake?
BEAUTY Beauty stands First and Last, fortified in Her stature.
SEA-NOTE The bejewelled crown of a golden wave.
SIREN The Siren walked along that edge of storm-burnished sea from whence she came. Her bare feet stepped upon the whispering shells that abandoned her.
THE POET With the fortitude of a handful of words, the Poet bends the wind, lights the Sun’s candle and extinguishes the destroyer of dreams.
ON BOARD The Sirens saw the passing ship and waved, but those on board did not see them, they were lost in their own mythology.