…Just by Using More Red
All right, a rather flat joke. Some time ago, I showed a few painted dreams in Dreamtellers. I often associate dream images with cool blues and greys. Here I wanted to see what would happen if red dominated instead. It seems to work; the red is brighter in the original than in this photograph.
Chinese calligraphy often influences my work, but here I wanted to try a more ‘Western’ approach. This is still a study. I could have kept working, but I chose to leave it at this stage rather than lose the mood that interested me.
I like working along the border between realism and abstraction, and I wanted to stay on that border here.
Work from December
In December 2022, I experimented with several other works, with mixed results, and put them aside. Returning to them, I found two I wanted to show.
Day and Night and Night and Day
The idea behind this study still appeals to me, though I will leave it largely to the painting to suggest.
Rest and Movement
The second study concerns movement and stillness. Trying to make something of Dao tangible, I thought of a colony of bees: continual whirring and activity, yet a kind of calm at the centre. Later I carried that thought into an imagined refugee camp. I was thinking about the coexistence of apparent stillness and constant movement, rather than depicting a particular place. The scene takes shape in the mind.
An Extra: My Trader and Daoist Selves
In January 2023, I was speaking to a friend about the disappointing stock market. I tried to encourage him. ‘My best share is up 5,000 per cent,’ I said. ‘Could you have missed a zero?’ he asked. Perhaps he was right. When I looked again, the display showed more than 101,000 per cent; a later reading was around 108,000 per cent.
My trader’s soul says, ‘Sell, man! What are you waiting for?’ My Daoist soul replies, ‘wu wei.’[1]
A clarification: the screenshot shows 101,373.15% in the gain/loss column. This is a percentage gain, not a cash profit of 101,373.15. The later ‘108k’ likewise refers to the percentage displayed.
Unfortunately, the original investment was too small for this to impress anyone, or to finance a winter in Bali. 😊
Footnotes
[1] 無為 (wu wei), often translated as ‘nonaction’, is a central Daoist idea connected with naturalness in action. The exchange above is a joke about my own hesitation. For the philosophical context, see Laozi, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ↩
Related articles: Dreamtellers · Out of the Blues, into the Blue · White, Black, Red
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