Music of 2014

Helplessly, a large part of our lives will be forever buried in the abyss of the forgotten.

Music is the breadcrumbs we leave behind.

Here's to 2014.

"We pin them down to one meaning…. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die."

-Virginia Woolf

How to paint BUS STOP on a road

Street typography from Tom Williams on Vimeo.

Elbow - This Blue World

While three chambers of my heart beat true and strong with love for another

The fourth, 
the fourth is yours forever.

Richard Hawley’s Don’t Stare at the Sun

Good art makes us see something we normally don't.

Credit to director George Belfield.

Time and Beauty

Time plays a big part in our discovery of beauty. Either we observe a thing for hours, or quicker, we condense hours of observation into few minutes.

EXISTENCE A TIMELAPSE PROJECT from Michael Shainblum on Vimeo.

Lying on a beach, I gazed upon the sky, through the clouds and into the bluest void, I made a journey to infinity and back.

FLY

However you are (I am) cynical, pessimistic and melancholic, there's always little something inside that's agitated, quietly yearning to be somewhere a bit beyond, to be someone a bit better, to do something a bit more wonderful…yes it's to FLY… like a bird… to the sky… to the sun… to the Light…

I wish I could say something more, instead, I could only ask: Isn't it beautiful?

King Creosote & Jon Hopkins

Radiant

The supreme prayer of my heart is not to be learned, rich, famous, powerful, or "good," but simply to be radiant. I desire to radiate health, cheerfulness, calm courage and good will. I wish to live without hate, whim, jealousy, envy, fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank, natural, clean in mind and clean in body, unaffected—ready to say "I do not know," if it be so, and to meet all men on an absolute equality—to face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid.

I wish others to live their lives, too—up to their highest, fullest and best. To that end I pray that I may never meddle, interfere, dictate, give advice that is not wanted, or assist when my services are not needed. If I can help people, I'll do it by giving them a chance to help themselves; and if I can uplift or inspire, let it be by example, inference, and suggestion, rather than by injunction and dictation. That is to say, I desire to be radiant—to radiate life.

Love, Life & Work – Elbert Hubbard

Ride of Passage

Ride of Passage No. 1, Oil on board, 8"x10"

Ride of Passage No. 2, Oil on board, 8"x10"

to
the time we rode,
the path we trod,
the land we wasted,
the paradise we lost.

Merry Christmas...



...and Happy New Year!

Of night and light and the half-light

Untitled, Oil on canvas, 8"x10"

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W. B. Yeast

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

We spend very large part of our life working. Yet very often (and more emphatically when it sucks) we ask: What's the point of it? In truth, maybe it's not work that we cannot make sense of, but life.

When one works in advertising, the question comes more imminent and paramount with the package offers of long hours, overtime, underpay, the enmity of clients and the stress of deadlines. As the moan and groan are getting heavier and more frequent around, I find myself drawing my thought to the last page of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton. The perplexity of our question may not be answered, but at least it offers a perspective in which we could find a sense of consolation, albeit tinted with irony.

To see ourselves as the centre of the the universe and the present time as the summit of history, to view our upcoming meetings as being overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to feel the pressure of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference agendas marked '11:00 a.m. to 11:15.: coffee break', to behave heedlessly and greedily and then to combust in battle, to work frantically through the night for a million-billing account pitch (or worse just a thousand one) [My addition] – maybe all of this, in the end, is working wisdom. It is paying death too much respect to prepare for it with sage prescriptions. Let it surprise us while we are shipping wood pulp across the Baltic Sea, removing the heads of tuna, developing a nauseating variety of biscuit, advising a client on a change of career, firing a satellite with which to beguile a generation of Japanese schoolgirls, painting an oak tree in a field, laying an electricity line, doing the accounts, inventing a deodorant dispenser or making an extended-strength coil tube for an airline or brainstorming an advertising campaign for a skincare brand [My addition]. Let death find us we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

If we could witness the eventful fate of every one of our projects, we would have no choice but to succumb to the immediate paralysis. Would anyone who watched the departure of Xerxes' army on its way to conquer the Greeks, or Tai Chan Ahk giving orders for the construction of the golden temples of Cancuén, or the British colonial administrators inaugurating the Indian postal system, or David Ogilvy briefing his account executives on how to make Dove the best selling soap in the U.S. [My addition], had it in their hearts to fill their passionate actors in on the eventual fate of their efforts?

Our work will at least distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table, It will have misled us to complain about our unreasonable malicious manipulative over-demanding ungrateful clients (or/and bosses) as our worse nightmare [My addition]. It will have kept us out of greater trouble.  

Revelation No.3

Revelation No.3, Oil on canvas, 8"x10"

I see
I find
I feel
I wonder
I think
I guess
I suspect
I suppose
I realize
I reckon
I believe
I doubt
I believe

The Cinematic Orchestra

Stumbled upon this band, The Cinematic Orchestra (the "orchestra" is misleading, what you see in the above video is just the supporting act for the live performance, they are actually a British electronic outfit). It's hard to categorize them. I can only say their music possess a soundtrack-like quality as their name suggests. When I searched for the lyrics of "To Build A Home", a casual post under the comments touched me unexpectedly, like something struck you and transported you beyond your daily thoughts.

"a man, his life settled, with others in tow, feels like a solitary figure in a lonely world. then he meets her. she, from the first glance, is strangely like home to him. against the stigma, against the odds, he embraces her. he builds a home away from home with her. he sees world like never before. he lives, but in his descent, he grasps the details for what they are. entirely real yet unreal. sadness grips him. the road diverges. he stands at the fork with two tragic paths before him. either way, a part of him will leave and turn to dust."





These led me to the singer Patrick Watson. Here's his "The Great Escape". With this a little enigmatic MV as a backdrop, it could well be a secular hymn for the modern work life, I suppose.

Revelation No.2

Revelation No.2, Oil on canvas, 8"x10"

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind

Ode: Intimations of Immortality, X
William Wordsworth

Status: In a relationship with Virginia Woolf

...He heard her quick step above, heard her voice cheerful, then low; looked at the mats, tea caddies, glass shades; waited quite impatiently; looked forward eagerly to the walk home, determined to carry her bag; then heard her come out; shut a door; say they must keep the windows open and the door shut, ask at the house for anything they wanted (she must be talking to a child), when, suddenly, in she came, stood for a moment silent (as if she had been pretending up there, and for a moment let herself be now), stood quite motionless for a moment against a picture of Queen Victoria wearing the blue ribbon of Garter; and all at once he realised that it was this; it was this – she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

It's just one of many very long lines (or rather flows of rhythmic narrative) in her writings like minutes of uncut cinematic shot coming to a revelatory end.

Considered to be Woolf's most autobiographical novel, words became floods of intense observation of human psychology and creative impetus that was so masterfully composed and orchestrated to the threshold of either to irrigate or to destroy. It's exhilarating. But at the same time you inevitably feel a bit disturbed and sympathize with the burden of her genius (she suffered depression through her life and in the end walked into a river near her home and drowned). You see a mind at work, a soul ventured, lamented and unfortunately despaired, some eighty years ago. It reaffirms my belief: Great art is transcendent, in the loosest possible sense of the word.

George Shaw shortlisted for the Turner Prize

George Shaw, Scenes from The Passion: The Cop Shop (1999-2000)
Humbrol enamel on board

The nominees for this year's Turner Prize announced, they are Karla Black, Martin Boyce, Hilary Lloyd and George Shaw. I am excited by the news. Two years ago, I posted about my accidental encounter with Shaw's paintings and how they reignited my passion to paint again. And here you are, his seemingly conservative art has entered onto the big (if not the biggest) stage in the art world. I hope he can win it, for paintings, for people who still believe in paintings, for artists who keep true to themselves and ignore the hip and the glamourous of the mainstream while humbly dabbing paints and dirtying their pants.