A week ahead of tragedy in Jaipur

I’ve recently been travelling through Malaysia, India and Nepal, carrying out work for WWF. In my travels it seems I’ve been one week ahead of tragedy. I left Malaysia a week before the cyclone hit Burma not too far from where I was and I left Jaipur in India less than a week before seven bombs went off almost simultaneously in and around the city. 80 people were killed and over 150 people injured. Most of the bombs went off in areas that I had been to, including the Monkey Temple, where a 10 year old boy was killed. There are many reports on the bombing online, including this one in the Sydney Morning Herald.

As if life isn’t difficult enough already in Jaipur! Here wealth means you have a change of clothes and a concrete floor under you. In India it is estimated that there are 44 million child labourers and two in five people live in poverty. The cast system and lack of education makes it difficult for many to escape these conditions and find a well-paying job. This forces many children to work to help to support their families. Children often work in dangerous conditions and are forced out of an education and out of a childhood by taking on adult responsibilities, duties and working hours.

Whilst I did enjoy the history and rich cultures and colours of the areas I travelled through I was aware of the conditions the local people were living under. I’ve arrived home with a renewed sense of wanting to put my position of privilege to good use. I have a few ideas on where to start and I’ll be enlisting the help of all my friends to brainstorm ideas and to bring them into being. If you know of anyone that is doing good work in the area or have some ideas that you would like to see put into play please let me know.

The universal language: shopping!

According to the locals, in centuries past, everyone wanted to take over Jaipur (pron. Jay-poor) and many efforts were made to take the area by force. Located south, south, west of Delhi (Dilli), Jaipur is a dessert area, surrounded by hills that afford natural protection. Each ridge is lined with a defensive wall and posts for the soldiers that once guarded the territory. With a great history of Maharajas, their wives, concubines, eunuchs, palaces, forts and local villages, it is an interesting place to visit.

Like the rest of India, everyone wants some of your money. One soon discovers that there are not too many people who will help you out ‘just to be nice’ (is this an Antipodean thing?). Even when it was made clear that I didn’t wanted to be deposited anywhere on ‘the tourist trail’ I still ended up on it. The only difference being that this time the shops that pay the drivers their 25% commission pretend to be genuine, with ‘just for show’ dyeing machines cranked up for the benefit of tourists. While this mindset was frustrating, I also met a number of very generous people, particularly the folks at WWF in Delhi.

Jaipur is a big city and more than 3 million people call it home yet is still relatively easy to be close to the local people here. My tuktuk driver S.K. Meena insisted I accompany him to his home for a cup of chai and to meet his family, he has a wife, a 15 year old daughter and 2 sons, 11 and 10 years old.

By comparison to the rest of his village, it would appear SK Meena lives well. His house has 5 rooms (including the kitchen) and concrete floors. He proudly showed me photographs sent in a letter from a Canadian man he had chauffeured around. After our tea, the family changed clothes and brushed their hair ready to have their photographs taken and then we moved across the street to meet his brother’s family.

SK Meena then asked if it was ok for his family to grab a lift into town, we set off in the back of the tuktuk, his wife, daughter, niece and myself. Although I had planned a trip to the Museum of Indology, I swapped the opportunity to see a map of India painted on grain of rice for a days shopping in the local bazaars with the women.

I soon discovered that this was a mutually beneficial relationship. I paid a little more than them for items (but still a fraction of what I’d have paid had I been shopping alone) and they paid less than they would’ve paid had they been shopping by themselves. It was fun, with all the women suggesting the items and colours they thought I should wear.

Even though Jaipur has a strong tourist industry, westerners are still uncommon here, outside the main tourist attractions and hotels, I was stared at everywhere I went. The locals I met were very confused as to why my husband was not travelling with me, no amount of explaining that I am working whilst here and that he must stay behind and work provided a satisfactory answer.

After shopping I had cause to feign a sugar-cane allergy so as not offend anyone by refusing the glass of juice that SK Meena bought for us all at a street-side stall. Although happy to eat from the street-side stalls and drink the chai there, I did avoid drinking the local water, and the sugar cane juice had ice in it.

Michael Sampson: Collaboration without Chaos

Insider knowledge: Michael has already blogged about his presentation and set it on a time-delay for publishing so even though he won’t touch his computer, at the end of this presentation a blog-post on his presentation will be posted, and here it is http://www.michaelsampson.net/2008/04/notes-on-the-ke.html. Old link lying in wait http://www.michaelsampson.net/chaos.html

The title of Michael’s presentation ‘Collaboration without Chaos’ is, says Michael an oxymoron, as collaborative work is chaotic, it’s disordered and hard to follow as people go through ideas and work with each other.

Is a meeting chaotic? Of course it is, minutes help to organise this by creating a summary or a shared agreement:

• What do we do now?
• Who has the monkey on their back?
• What did we agree?
• Where are we at?
• What else needs to be done?

These principles apply to collaboration, discussion threads are chaotic, and these require summation by a person. It is the conflict within the medium that generates ideas and we don’t want to lose that.

Michael talked about the knife, the fork and the spoon of collaboration.

7 volunteers to join Michael on-stage, my colleague Catherine Grenfell is up there (why is everything 7 with Michael?), the 7 have place names (3 x Hong Kong, 2 x Sydney, 2 x Boston etc), they are joined by Leslie a new member and she is looking for the global offices. She chooses on randomly and then the 7 are asked to fold down their pages, the bottom part contains information about the number of people that have visited the pages, their rating and their tags. This is capturing implicit knowledge and making it available. It also shows who the experts are, by what they have tagged, written, visited. We gave a virtual round of applause to the volunteers. This is social rather than machine algorithms, ‘rate this content,’ ‘tags for classification,’ ‘expertise surfacing.’ Experts are able to see what’s not there (as well as what is there).

How do we make it work within the organisation?

• Greenfields environ: Group Swim
• Existing: leverage what you have by adding in social algorithms
• Easy things: the right technology, avoid tools that make life harder, train on functions and the practices
• Hard things: new technology threatens the social order, how do people actually work, collaboration tools become invisible

One blog to rule them all: http://www.michaelsampson.net/2008/04/notes-on-the-ke.html ,or at least one to help with some of the chaos

Questions

Q: Are these things fundamental, or will we look back in 10 years and say this is totally out of date?

A: The concept will stand, the tools will change.

Follow-up question: Will the approach change?

Answer from the group: The core people stuff will apply

Q: Is there a role for experts in the future?

A: About giving organisations as well as people a way to collaborate

NB: Not all the questions are presented here. The questions section was interesting as it was very philosophical and future-thinking.

Brightstar 6th Annual IM Conference: Kim Sbarcea

Here I am day 2 of the Brightstar conference in Wellington, New Zealand, blogging behind Michael Sampson who is blogging on Kim Sbarcea talking about blogging, whilst I am blogging about him blogging and Kim talking about blogging.

Kim is giving a fascination presentation on social media, starting with a bit of run-through as to why anyone would get involved in the first place. Kim starts by exploring our implicit desire to learn and to garner knowledge, social media provides the ability to link with other like-minded people. These things, says Kim are all about serendipity, following others connections, “you pop onto facebook or whatever and there is that piece of knowledge that you didn’t know you wanted” and you can follow it through from there.

Social media allows us to build up trust, one trusted person will create links to other many other blogs and through our one trusted contact, we find many other trusted contacts. In her own blog Kim links to Dave Snowdon, Patrick Lambe and they do the same. Those people at this conference who have not met any of these people before, and who respond positively to Kim will (or may) now have a group of trusted experts that they can leverage to improve their own learning and knowledge. Social media creates a wrap-around and brings these communities to the light. This is great. It’s unstructured and dynamic, continuously evolving and this works well with humans, but with this comes a tension, particularly in relation to organisations  as they are structured. Social media is challenging the notion that knowledge is static, the first generation of intranets were stuffed full of documents. This mirrors my latest catch-cry that ‘Intranets are dead’ meaning that is no longer useful or acceptable to drive this early model of intranets, and that intranets must be unbounded so that they embrace the social media technologies and other ways of working.

These new systems are emergent and the days of the traditional IT shop are numbered, along with those of the tyrannical rule of the IT expert. It is no longer difficult to understand and use technology, Gen X and Y, already know how to use everything, they come in with this knowledge. User-generated content and control is in the hands of the users.

10 barriers to Social Media (as per Wired Magazine)

Top 10 barriers to social media …
The research on the above, from WIRED magazine:
1. the lack of a demonstrable business case … 72%
2. a resistance to change (management and staff) … 34%
3. a fear of loss of control or a loss of real control … 44%
4. a fear of transparency (amongst senior managemen) … 37%
5. not a sufficiently high priority … 34%
6. a fear of misuse … 34%
7. a lack of employee access … 28%
8. a lack of clarity over implementation - process and technology … 28%
9. no clear measurement for success … 28%
10. compliance and regulation … 12%

Note: I noted that Michael was doing a far better job of noting these, so I grabbed them off his site.

Social media is bringing the individual into the public space, and this raises concerns, particularly relating to young people in particular. There is lots of media coverage on this, and most of us are aware of the perils and issues. Beyond this employers are starting to look at Google and MySpace to see who employees and prospective employees are connected with and what these people are all about.

Whilst these are things that must be considered, there are many advantages. It does allow you to showcase your talent, and expertise, and it does help you to have a voice, be attractive to am employer and redraw the boundaries between the public and the private.

Kim looked at blogs and the legal profession (Kim has a legal background, is there anything that she hasn’t done?). ‘Lawyers have blawgs’ that provide a day in the life of lawyers, for the low-down on KM and the legal profession see kmspace.blogspot.com for a more up-close-and-personal account Lawyer Trix is the go. Lawyer Trix blogs anonymously as she would likely loose her job were it known that she was blogging.

Kim asked: Why don’t organisations get it? It’s a great internal tool for communicating? Sure there are security measures to be considered, but these are not insurmountable. The challenges for organisations include the move to:

• Folksonomies rather than taxsonomies
• Relinquishing the control of vocabularly
• Use-driven technology
• Emergent, rather than fully-formed technology systems and more

Individual challenges include:

• How much of myself do I make public
• Employees may know you
• Do you learn more about yourself?
• Doe we tag things because we think they are interesting or because others will think they are interesting.

A mind-map on the three Cs of blogging providing good insight into the capabilities required for successful blogging:

Competencies - Technical. Organised. Rading/RSS. Writing. Message.

Comfort - Thick skinned. Be in spotlight. Willing to learn. Honest and transparent.

Capacity - Self-starter. Discipline, Time. Work hard and smart. Social. Consistency

Time was now running out, shame, as I could’ve listened to Kim all day (even after spending the previous evening dining with Kim and a colleague the night before). Kim finished by skipping quickly through Social bookmarking, Delicious, Magnolia and citizen journalists, visit english.ohmynews the best and the biggest in this area, for the A-Z of social media, sign up to the social media site and read the social meda advocacy site: Web worker daily

Finally beware: lessons from the (ex) Mayor of Arlington, Oregon, Carmen Kontur-Gronquist. Who was recalled as Mayor for sexy photos showing off her sexy gym-toned body on the internet and then went on to be a micro-celebrity.

Kim finished up by outlining the ways that ASIC are using social media. Fabulous as always: thanks Kim.

Departure lounge

In keeping with current practices, this painting was named by the person who had the strongest reaction to it. Interestingly enough, a few weeks later when I told him the painting was finished and referred to it by name, he didn’t recall naming it!

More than any of the paintings, this one has undergone the most change. Members of my household implored me to stop painting on this canvas and they joked about it being 7 paintings in one. They’d come down to the studio the morning after a session and look in dismay at the canvas. I’d ask “don’t you like the painting?” “Well, yes,” they’d answer, “only it should’ve been painted on a new canvas, not over that other painting! The other one was finished.”

I could’ve stopped, or finished the painting many times along the way and in fact I did… only to start again. This is what it looked like the first time I stopped, after the yoga retreat last October.

So when is a painting finished? Howard Hodgkin is not the first to say that a painting is finished when the subject matter comes back and Hodgkin exercises far more patience than I waiting for it’s return. He goes to his studio “every day and waits, unmasking a painting at will, looking at it until some way of making progress occurs to him, and then he sets to work. Using this method, it could take two or three years, or more, before the subject that began in his mind has become the finished object. Once the picture is painted, he says, it’s on its own, to look after itself. Even though it does not belong to him any more, none the less he does not like being in the room with someone else looking at his pictures… A painting is finished, he says, when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.”

All my paintings look horrific along the way and their metamorphosing into something that people might actually enjoy looking at seems unlikely. Hodgkin covers up his unfinished paintings with screens. No-one has ever seen any of his unfinished work. Hodgkin himself only views (removes the screen from) one unfinished painting at a time. To him, the idea of uncovering them all is unthinkable, he says he would run screaming out of the studio.

I love and hate losing my paintings along the way. They start off with a sense of purpose that is rarely (never?) sustained. It’s uncomfortable, frustrating and, there is no assurance that it will all work out in the end.

At some point the subject comes back and I know that I will soon be staring at a blank canvas again. This is possibly the only thing worse than losing certainty in the middle of a painting or ironically of regaining it at the end. I think I agree with Hodgkin, I hate painting, luckily for me I love it too.

As yet untitled (maybe)

I’m not a fan of naming my own paintings. After all who am I attribute meaning? That’s not for me to do, better that each person who looks at the work does this. My latest practice for naming paintings is to take the name from the person who has had the strongest reaction to the painting when visiting the studio. This usually means taking cues from what they say ‘it looks like to them’.

In the case of this painting the observation was that it ‘looks like viruses, ghosts and balls.’ Each of these seemingly disparate components maybe has more in common than one would think.

I have a long-standing fascination with viruses and their connection to us, in particular how our irresponsible acts bring them into our lives; acts like deforestation in the oldest parts of the Amazon and the far corners of Africa. Humans venturing where they should not venture with little or no regard for the damage they are doing. Releasing viruses into the human population; those that are the biggest threat to us, move like waves ebbing and flowing against and within us; others burn quick and fierce and then abate just as quickly.

In the book, ‘The Hot Zone’ Richard Preston Transworld Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd, Australia, p365 –369 agrees, he says, “The emergence of AIDS, Ebola, and any number of other tropical rain-forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere. The emerging viruses are surfacing from ecologically damaged parts of the earth. Many of them come from the tattered edges of tropical rain forest, or they come from tropical savanna that is being settled rapidly by people. The tropical rain forests are the deep reservoirs of life on the planet, containing most of the world’s plant and animal species. The rain forests are also its largest reservoirs of viruses, since all living things carry viruses. When they come out of an ecosystem, they tend to spread in waves through the human population, like echoes from the dying biosphere. Here are the names of some emerging viruses: Lassa. Rift Valley. Oropouche. Rocio. Q. Guaranarito. The hantaviruses. Machupo. Dengue. Chikungunya. Junin. The rabies-like strains Mokola and Duvenhage. LeDantec. The Kyasanur Forest brain virus. HIV – which is very much an emerging virus, because its penetration of the human species is increasingly rapidly, with no end in sight. The Semliki Forest agent. Crimean Congo. Sindbis. O’nyong nyong. Nameless Sao Paulo. Marburg. Ebola Sudan. Ebola Zaire. Ebola Reston.

In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rots in Europe, Japan and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. Perhaps the biosphere does not ‘like’ the idea of five billion humans… The rain forest has its own defences. The earth’s immune system, so to speak, is seeing the presence of the human species and is starting to kick in. The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by the human parasite. Perhaps AIDS is the first step in a natural process of clearance.
I begin to wonder, with a sense of foreboding, if AIDS might not be the end but only the beginning. I suspect that AIDS is not an accident or an isolated occurrence but a step in the natural process that does not look friendly to my species, and that AIDS might not be Nature’s pre-eminent display of power. Whether the human race can actually maintain a population of five billion or more without a crash with a hot virus remains an open question. The answer lies hidden in the labyrinth of tropical ecosystems. AIDS is the revenge of the rain forest. It is only the first act of the revenge…

Joseph B. McCormick. MD, Susan Fisher-Hoch, MD share this point of view in their book, ‘Level 4 – Virus hunters of the CD’ “Let us not be fooled as to the driving force behind the emergence of all these level 4 viruses: it is our own species. These microbes do not lurk in some dark corner waiting to pounce, in ambuscade for human prey. It is we who interfere with their habitat, not the other way around. Left to their own devices, they reside successfully and often silently in biological balance with their natural hosts. Only when man invades their environment does he become their prey. In spite of appearances, the truth is that viruses rarely ‘emerge’. What is happening is that overpopulation and expansion of human habitation and activities violate their hiding places and force themselves into the open. Humankind serves no purpose to a hemorrhagic fever virus; people are not required for its long-term survival. Quite the contrary, we are the dead-end hosts; when we die, the virus dies with us.” “And then there are other viruses, not level 4, that really are exclusively human pathogens. We are their natural host and they are out to get us. Obviously the more of us there are, and the more crowded our living space, then the easier it is for these viruses to spread and cause diseases like AIDS and hepatitis.” “While we have studied hemorrhagic fevers, we gradually came to realise that the issue of emerging diseases cannot be considered in a medical or scientific vacuum – we also have to take into account such social issues as overpopulation, poverty and uncontrollable urbanization, all of which put pressure on the virus habitat… in the world of viruses, we are the invaders.”

Each of these books offer a compelling read from multiple standpoints, anthropologist, amateur detective, greenie, train spotter, let me know what you think. Following the trail; ghosts, somewhat like viruses exist along the edge. Ghost are closely associated with the ancient concept of animism, which attributed souls to everything in nature, including human beings, animals, plants, rocks, etc. In some ways ghosts exemplify the modern dilemma, caught between evidence and belief, existing on a knife edge and also existing at the juncture between life and death, crossing from one to another, not fully whole in either place.

Balls is such an odd one, anatomically, the ball of the foot, the ball of the thumb and of course as a slang for certain parts of the male anatomy. Anatomically speaking all ‘balls’ are a protuberance. To have them (that is balls) is have a bit of gusto, oomph, get-up-and-go, and also contrarily to be full of hot air, to be without credence, as in ‘that’s a load of balls.’ In baseball, four balls and you walk, that is if the pitcher sends the ball to the batter outside the strike zone four times, then the batter gets a ‘free ticket’ to first base. Ball has such a wide variety of use, meaning neither one thing nor the other, or perhaps more appropriately meaning one thing and it’s mirror.

I rested on the title ‘Edge of Life’ for the painting, it has meaning for me and it seems somehow appropriate for the friend who named it also. I know that she’ll puzzle over what that means, these things are universal and specific, I am sure that we can all find the edge of life that we are on, and that we constantly occupy this territory as we constantly move from one thing in life to another.

As an aside this painting is painted out two doors and measures 6.8 x 5ft. I started the painting over 12 months ago, I never thought I would be able to finish it. It’s been one of the most challenging works to date. Flip it 180 degrees to see where it came from.

Arcade fire

I am having a great couple of weeks of music which is very unusual as I am somewhat of a music under-appreciator. A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to see Babylon Circus at the Becks Bar, this 10 piece big band were described in the Sydney Festival program as, “French blenders of ska-punk, chanson, funk, afro-beat, dancehall reggae and Eastern European folk (who) rouse the Bar with their multi-lingual antics and big-top energy.” Put a capital ‘E’ on energy; these guys leaped around 5 feet off the ground, barely touching down for most of the show. Without exception they took the whole crowd from 20 to 50-somethings to a pulsating, throbbing mass. Much of their music has a political focus with an anti-war theme underpinning their third album, Dances of Resistance. If you get the chance to catch a concert do so! I walked away from Babylon Circus thinking that I had my concert experience for 2008 (and it was only January!), then I found that one of my favourite bands, Arcade Fire was playing in Sydney (yay!) this month but… there were no tickets left (boo!)

Arcade Fire’s latest album Neon Bible was one of my repeatables in 2007, a repeatable is a single album that I play for months on end. Take that literally, I put it on stereo on repeat and let it play endlessly. How great it must be to live with me!

Arcade Fire is a sensational band from Canada, their music is layered with sounds (a church organ, military music from Budapest, a hurdy gurdy, violins, brass as well as all the usual suspects), references, meaning, political and social comment, a big heart and intelligent lyrics, (“Working for the church while our life falls apart. Singin’ hallelujah with the fear in your heart.“). So much so that I would set the challenge that there is no way to listen to their music without finding something that personally resonates in there.

Headed up by husband and wife team Win Butler (grew up in Texas) and Regina Chassagne (emigrated to Canada with her parents to escape the Haitian political situation), Arcade Fire have a unique way of digging at the heart of America that is insightful, unflinching and at the same time filled with a kind of pathos that ensures they never repeat the kind of dogma they expose and interrogate.

Described as an indie band (what does that mean anyway?), there are obvious musical references to Talking Heads and Bruce Springsteen, my musician partner also swears links to Burt Bacharach and Billy Joel, go figure, I can only see this at a very big stretch, let me know what you think.

Beyond their recorded and live music, their working process is also inspiring, Nasty little man says,

Coming off a year of intense touring, they wanted to just sit down and write some songs. And then record them. So they found a church out in a small town and turned it into a studio. They moved in all their amps and instruments, bought some nice curtains, stocked the fridge, and hunkered down. They were in no rush…

They knew they were working on an album, but didn’t know how long it would be, or what it would be called, or what songs would be on it, or what instruments would be on the songs. They knew they would produce it themselves, though—they had too many musical plans pent up in their brains to hand control over to someone else. So they found some grand engineers to make those musical plans reality—Markus Dravs (Bjork, James, Brian Eno) and Scott Colburn (Sun City Girls, Animal Collective).

If you missed the concert, buy the album for a taste here’s YouTube footage of them at Glastonbury.

If you are a budding musician or artist in whatever capacity and you can’t find the next project, maybe follow the lead of Arcade Fire, find a space, grab some friends and some instruments and get lost in playing until it all comes together.

BTW, I did get into the Arcade Fire concert last night (phew!) and it enters the archives as one of the best every musical moments ever, right up there with Icelandic band Sigur Ros who I saw in NZ a couple of years ago and local songsters Decoder Ring at Splendor in the Grass 2006. Next stop on the cultural milieu, La Clique in the spiegeltent Saturday week.

This is my latest painting, it owes it’s name, ‘Octopuss’ Garden’, to a friend dropping by during a particular arduous period in the painting’s life. If the painting owes a debt to this friend for it’s name, it also owes a debt to the paintings of Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) and my high-school art teacher, Bronwyn Culliford. Culliford was a particularly talented, if somewhat hard arse art teacher, under her less than pedestrian teaching techniques I freed myself from my ideas of what I wanted to paint. She handed me some reproductions of de Kooning’s work and banished me to the corridor outside the art room for the next year or two.

My process was thus…

1. Visit hardware stores and use all teenage charm to wrest them of left-over test pots of paint for free.

2. Hang a large (6ft plus) canvas, piece of paper or whatever at one end of the corridor.

3. Set up paints, brushes etc at the other other end of the corridor.

4. Hang out with the brushes and paints, look at the canvas, make a decision about where the next mark would go, the colour it would be etc.

5. Collect necessary materials (paint brush or similar loaded with paint) in my hand, run…. as in RUN RUN RUN at the canvas and use all that momentum to put that one mark on the canvas. BANG!

6. Turn around, walk back to the starting point, 20 metres or so away, replace brush and paint, settle in, look at the painting and repeat the process again… and again… and again…

I often repeat this story, why? Not because I have deep scars from the experience, in fact the opposite, it taught me a little bit about letting go, a whole lot about looking and deciding and most importantly about allowing enough space between marks so that each one could have it’s say before the next one said it’s piece.

In my late teens I grew to love de Kooning’s palette, bold mark-making and when I made my way overseas after art school and finally saw one of his works in the real for the first time I had a renewed sense of awe at the complexity, boldness and subtlety of the work that was hidden in even the most mindful reproduction; the ‘real’ Mona Lisa, on the other hand, far from being a revelation appeared the same in the Louvre as she did in any decent reproduction.

Tonight I finished reading ‘de Kooning, An American Master’. It is an amazing book, offering an unflinching view into de Kooning’s life; multiple mistresses, a wife, girlfriends (all at the same time), terrible alcoholicism in later life and obsessed with his art to the exclusion of anyone around him. It chronicles de Kooning in a way that is always insightful, never offering a gratuitous or voyeuristic look when it would have been easy to do so. I was transported into his life, and into his studio as a trusted assistant, watching the master at work, carrying his secrets… did you know that de Kooning might work on a single line for a day to make it look perfectly effortless?

An illegal immigrant to America from Holland in the 1920s, de Kooning was friends with artists such as Pollock, Kline, Rothko, Gorky and others before they became a part of a movement that turned heads outside Europe as the centre of art for the first time. The biography builds up a vivid picture of New York’s coming of age, the poverty and struggle many went through, the forming of an artists community and their bohemian lifestyles before any such phrase could become cliche.

So much for ‘artistic genius’ (not that I buy into this), it was usual for de Kooning to struggle with his paintings for long periods of time, in some cases he would work on a single painting for a year and half. On entering the studio each day, de Kooning would begin by scraping the previous day’s painting off the canvas and starting over. In the darkest of times he would work almost every day on a single painting, completing nothing for almost two years. This reluctance to complete works prevented de Kooning from having his first exhibition until well into his forties. When he did have his first show, it was a disaster and he sold nothing. Over the next decade despite being selected to represent America in the Venice Bienniale de Kooning still couldn’t sell work.

In his later years, de Kooning reversed both dynamics; painting around 100 works from 1983 - 1984. Now de Kooning seemed to let go, about painting at this time, he said, “There’s no end really, I just stop it. Abandon it”. He also starts to empty out his paintings; less paint and more and more white; a limited palette, often consisting of primary colours. Around this same time, de Kooning set the record for the highest price paid for the painting of a living artist, with Pink Lady selling for $3.63 million. De Kooning wouldn’t have received anything from the sale (an education on the archaic ways of the art world works wil be saved for another post).

Back in high-school I wanted to study Modigliani, an altogether tidier painter, who died young, in his early ’30s, I am glad that Bronwyn intervened so that I could wade into de Kooning and all his messiness, in the words of the master,

“I’m in my element when I am little bit out of this world: then I’m in a real world - I’m falling, I’m doing all right; when I’m slipping, I say hey, this is interesting! It’s when I’m standing upright that bothers me: I’m not doing so good; I’m stiff. As a matter of fact, I’m really slipping most of the time, into that glimpse. I’m like a slipping glimpser.”

… ponder what you could do as a slipping glimpser, “I think you can do miracles with what you have if you accept it.” de Kooning… a final quote from the stowaway from Rotterdam who decided to be an artist and became one of the best ever.

Peats Ridge Festival Cancelled

That which is great for the dams is not so great for the Peats Ridge Festival 2007. Organisers regret to say that the “highest December rainfall on record, coupled with six months of extremely wet weather has resulted in ground conditions that make it impossible for the Festival to proceed.” Full refunds of course, so the remaining question is, ‘where will the new party be taking place?’

World Tree

Blogging has given way to painting recently and the studio is stacked up with numerous partially finished paintings. I finally finished this one, entitled ‘World Tree’ on the weekend, at 6.4 x 4.5 ft (1980 x 1360mm) it’s quite a large canvas and I managed to break at least one wine glass moving it around the studio.

The title came from the Tree of Life (a bit tacky) also known as the World Tree (a little less tacky). Most of us would be familiar with the Tree of Life as a metaphor, sign and symbol that is found in many different religions, often signifying the rise of fall or us mere folks; wikipedia has the low down on this (of course).

There’s also a tree of life web project, this is a “collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. On more than 9000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics.

Each page contains information about a particular group of organisms (e.g., echinoderms, tyrannosaurs, phlox flowers, cephalopods, club fungi, or the salamanderfish of Western Australia). ToL pages are linked one to another hierarchically, in the form of the evolutionary tree of life. Starting with the root of all Life on Earth and moving out along diverging branches to individual species, the structure of the ToL project thus illustrates the genetic connections between all living things.”

I have a long-standing fascination with war films, over the years I have tended to war films as a response to terrible corporate management. In a rather extreme way they pose the question how would we operate on the frontline? Band Of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down are all top placeholders and I have watched them many times over. The Tree of Life film, currently in pre-production and rumoured to begin production in March 2008 is the latest project by director Terrence Malick who also directed The Thin Red Line. Though possibly one of my least favourite war films, my partner says I have incorrectly catalogued the film and that it belongs in a different section, under ‘meditation on death.’ It certainly makes more sense framed this way.

World Tree has taken me through many religions (ancient, popular and unpopular), the genesis and evolution of species to a pondering of war and meditation on death. I’d be interested in hearing your sense-making of/ response to the World Tree painting.