Visitors

Nothing new to post about, aside from the visit from down under - my sister Torunn and her husband Foad came up from Aussie-land the other day, from hot, burning summer to wake up to wet, fat snow flakes the morning after arrival, an incident so rare that my wife's son carry no such memory as it has been ten years since last time it happened here. It melted away soon enough, though, but it has been rather chilly. Still is. Sis got struck down with headache, nausea etc. today. Probably heavy jet-lagging. They'd been in the air and on the road more or less 42 hours before they arrived! Sydney-London. London-Madrid. Madrid-Viseu by car. Going back to Madrid tomorrow and heading for Oslo the day after that. And so on.
My sister who is a professional photographer (check the link to the right of here) started to take photos of my paintings and intended to continue today but I hope she will put rest first!
Anyway, here we are; Foad, Torunn and meself, a snap shot by PhotoBooth on my iMac:)

Two gentlemen

I have often used two skinny, androgynous figures in my works and I have called them Two Gentlemen. I am creating a series of them and this is Two Gentlemen in Hell...

African music...

I love African music and while playing it on my iPod, I painted this. What struck me afterwards, was that it looks Egyptian. So what, you may ask, Egypt is in Africa, isn't it? Yes, it is and maybe there is a connection there? Who knows?

While I am waiting...

... for my sister to come photograph my paintings - at least some of them - I thought I could show off a few badly taken photos of some of the first I made. This one is a portrait of a young girl - Marta - who worked supervising the initial exhibition on the fair, the beginning of the whole project. It was the first portrait I have ever painted. (I have drawn a few, though...)

A video greeting

I just fooled around with my iSight and thought I'd make a nice, little video greeting for those who would care. You find it here!

Sin and symbols

This won't be about art, but about some thoughts I have had upon the mythical language we find among other places, in religious scriptures. In our cultural sphere, the one which is most prominent is of course the Bible.

A while ago I bought and read a work in four bands of a German anthropologist and philosopher, Hans Peter Duerr. He went against the civilization theory which in short can be described as follows; that we become more complex as human beings, through the development of higher civilizations. He concentrates especially on 'shame'. It has been a widely spread belief that this is something we have developed as mentioned above, and that earlier times and 'primitive' civilizations, do not know shame to the same extent as we do.
He clearly proves that this isn't so and that, contrary to this, shame is something which exists everywhere and in all times. He postulates that shame is in fact closely connected with human consciousness. In other words; we can't be humans and shameless at the same time.

This added to some vague thoughts I have had for some time; about the idea of sin as we meet it through the Christian religion and as it is expressed in the Bible, especially in the myth of Eden. Sin has come to signify a feeling of doing something wrong, something we should be ashamed of. We also see it as something we choose to do and thus, we can choose not to do it, according to the common belief. But then comes the good tidings; Sweet Jesus has come to fix that for us. It doesn't matter if we do wrong because he will take it upon himself and good riddance and we can sing and dance and prance.

It sounds a bit primitive, doesn't it? A nice bed-time story for children, perhaps, but something adults are supposed to build their lives upon? Hm.

Now, if we look into the myth of Eden, we will soon enough find out that it wasn't because Adam and Eve had sex together that Masta God became angry with them. Neither was any apples involved. What happened was that Eve was tempted to taste of the Fruit of Knowledge and she liked that so much that she gave it to Adam, too. What is such a fruit supposed to give the person eating from it? What but knowledge? And what is knowledge if it is not consciousness? To be conscious is to be aware, to know. And when they gained consciousness, they became aware of themselves, of their Selves - and they saw themselves for the first time. And they saw that they were naked and felt shame.

But is this nakedness just about naked skin? I don't think so. I think it is a way of saying that their Self was bare to the world. When they dressed themselves to hide their nudity, it was not with fig leaves but probably with the masks of personality. That is what our personalities are; masks. They show and they conceal at the same time. They show something that is characteristic for us but they also conceal our true Self.

So what is this Sin, anyway? I think it has to do with the development of an ego. To be born a sinner, is quite simply to be born with an ego. That is something we cannot avoid. Without it, we are no longer conscious human beings. Thus, sin could be translated with ego, but it is probably more complicated. It is also an act we can perform, something we can choose to do or let be.

But how can we choose to act our ego? Why, through the emphasizing of it; something which is known as egotism.

Let me refer to something an old friend told me once. The first thing she remembered was from when she was two years old and it was simply that she was on a beach with her parents and suddenly she was struck by the insight that those two people who sat away from her were her parents and that she was separated from them, that they were away from her. She realised that she and they were separated, not living together in a symbiotic existence.

I think that shows us what the ego is and also consciousness. To be aware of ourselves, we must separate ourselves from the surroundings - and from other selves. Ego equals separation. It breaks a unity, a symbiosis. We separate from our father who are in heaven et cetera. We must leave the sheltered existence in the lush garden and walk out into the barren desert, out into life.

I am convinced that the myth of Eden is nothing but the story about the birth of mankind. Eden is not a place on this planet, but it was a level where the buds of mankind once existed, maybe outside space and time as we know it. A pre-physical existence in symbiosis with whatever created us, what later became us.

That is of course pure speculation.

To sin is therefore to further separate ourselves from what and where we came from. I think it is safe to bundle that up under the term 'the spiritual world' in lack of anything more specific. Maybe one just can't be more specific about it?

If it is so, then of course the ego is a double-edged sword. It brings us to consciousness but at the same time, it is a lock which prevents us from returning to the same spiritual world, our origin.

The question is then, is the mystery of Christ about unlocking the lock? I will leave it there, though.

This should show to some extent, at least, that it is most probably a more complex story than the fairy tale we are mostly told.


........


After this, I have come across at least one other mythical symbol which I think I have begun to see the meaning of. I think that bodies of waters and the crossing of them signifies something specific in mythical texts. I wonder if we are not dealing with steps in the evolution of mankind again, probably from pre-historic times. These stories are shrouded in a quasi-historic outfit but that is probably nothing but a disguise. When Moses is leading Israel across the divided waters and the Egyptians drowns in the thundering waves of the sea coming together again, we are probably not told anything that has anything to do with Jews and Egyptians at all, but Israel is the surviving part of mankind which manages to continue to the next step of evolution while 'the Egyptians' are a symbolic reference to what did not survive. It may not even deal with human beings as individuals, like homo sapiens and homo erectus, but rather with different characteristics within what is human.

It could for instance be about some faculties within us which at that time held us captive and how we struggled free from it and how these faculties disappeared. The water may be a symbol for time, for instance. To cross it is to reach a new era.

Suffice it to say that myths probably have a lot more to tell us than is the common belief today. They are certainly not naive stories told by scared cavemen who didn't have the faintest idea what thunder and lightning was. Such explanations just show how we behave like arrogant colonialists towards our past and those who lived in it.

Hangin' out, hangin' in, hangin' on...

Funny how an alkie who isn't practicing his thing still can suffer from a hangover!
It was the opening of an art supplies-store belonging to a friend and colleague, yesterday.. umm.. no, make that Saturday since yesterday is now already Sunday, at least in these corners of this planet. (How a mainly round object can have corners is a totally different question which we shan't delve further into here...) Being Nordic and the restless person I am, I showed up on time, which no one else did, of course, since we are in Portugal. That is also the reason why I have bought a wrist-watch from which is sometimes hard to read the correct time.
Anyway, it was nice to meet even more people and in-between socializing, I found time to give myself another injection with painting.

I don't know if I can call it 'periods' as some people seriously believe that artists go through, but I have left every object and am axploring the purely abstract surface.

Why? Because.

Because I was looking at the surfaces of some of my canvases, different areas etc., and I saw some interesting things there I thought it would be fun to elaborate.

I somehow think that everything about art is to hit the right spot. In music it is the right tones, the right harmonies and even disharmonies. In sculpture it is where surfaces meet, it is where convex changes into the concave. Where light meets heavy. In painting it is about composition to put it short.

Now, I am sure there are lots of tricks to compose it the right way but I am afraid I am totally ignorant about it all. To me it is about a kind of intuition. You have to sense where that line should meet the other one, where that circle crosses the other. You should just feel when you have hit the right spot and I doubt there is any theory in the world which can substitute that feeling.

Working abstract is about hitting the spot that makes it hot. Mmmmm....

Enough about that.

I sincerely think that it is a difference between home rolled cigs and factory made ones. It is the latter ones that gives us the headaches and the bad results from passive smoking.

But it was a nice night, aside from one part where some of my friends indulged in some hobby they seem to have here; to dig into the innermost corners of suffering souls that happens to come within the range of attention. The pain of lost loves - ah! let us dig into that, my friends. I know that pain, myself and I can feel with anyone else who may have known or still know it so I have absolutely no desire to bore into those regions, for whatever reason it may be. Leave it be, I say. Let us sing another song, boys - this one has grown old and bitter! So I had to leave the party for a while, asking them if they were all part of some kind of a mental masochist-sadist club or something?

But later in the night, I got the chance to speak one of the few languages I feel I speak rather fluent; English! Ah, what a relief! No more stumbling across the complexity of Portuguese verbs and masculine or feminine substantives and the plethora of nouns!

I do love speaking Portuguese, but it is a frustrating excercise at times, when you want to let your words flow eloquently, but the tongue is twisted into intelligible knots across some horrible syllables and accentuations. That might happen to me with any language I know, but in Norwegian, Swedish and English it is on more rare occasions.

The entertainment was also good - in one bar a fight among drunken youngsters flared up and it was a lot of ado for nothing much, really. This is Nordic, I told my friends at first, but after a while I changed my mind. They do scream more and fight less here. Anyway, no guns were pulled and no knives so that was a good thing. These are not violent corners (that term again!) of the world, but you just never know. It has happened before here. The coppers arrived, solid doors were closed and the main part of the crowd were shown to the exit and my friends and I could enjoy a good Pica Pau.

All in all; a close to perfect Saturday Night - but the hangover of sobriety was not that good!

And the centre was closed so no paint today - eh, yesterday. Sunday.

Painting and painting and painting and...

I made a count in my head tonight and since mid-September I have finished more or less 40 canvases. 10 of them belong to Expovis and some I have given away but there are still well over 20 left.

Tonight I became almost desperate! I used up the two last I had, two smaller ones. Painted two portraits on them, trying to paint away the details and to avoid becoming kitschy. I had the same problem with one larger I made, inspired by Iren's work, but of course totally different - two eyes in a haze. Yes, yes, very nice, all right, but too damned nice! I painted over and over with white but blue is such an easy colour sometimes, too easy and too nice.
OK, depending on what blue, of course, but hey, I am that kind of artist who doesn't remember all those different names on the colours - like with people's names, but I don't forget a face!

Colours have to become a little dirty to become interesting, though. And I am scratching a lot into the paint.

But I'd like to find something like transparent, fluid glass to mix pigments into and to create translucent layers with. That would be interesting. Maybe I find it some time soon? PVC?

Anyway, it was a holiday here because of All Saints Day so I thought that most shops were closed, but to my surprise, I found one who sell canvases open! Their PC got the blue screen of death (told them to get a Mac!) but I got my canvases and the night was saved! I began one which I think I will call "Early one morning in the Universe" :)

I just don't know how to stop...

Neither do I know whether my art is worth anything, but who cares? I am painting and painting and painting, anyway.

Beautiful and uneasy

Painting again and celebrating All Hallows Eve, Samhain, Allehelgona aka Halloween afterwards by going to The Irish Bar and watching people drinking aguardente with flames! Not anything for me, though, but I admit I had one bottle of water WITH gas or whatever it is called in English again. Normally, I only drink ordinary, bottled water.

Nothing new going on in my mind but I would like to direct anyone who may read this to the site of my old friend Iren Gule, because she is into something very interesting. I find her art beautiful and enchanting as well as creating a disturbing sense of uneasiness in me.