Thomas C Chung

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomasturtlechung/4619907084/

....and his art:

A friend from art school, and a wonderful playful artist with a dark side. Loving the shadows that are cast within, loving the fresh, fun, playful sculptures he crochets. Neally everything is personified, animated, imagined. Like a scene from childhood. The knitted paint tin toys say it all, and the world goes on backwards, forwards, inwards and outside, like a game, for adults.

Thomas is based in sweden and exhibits regularly. If you are lucky enough you might catch him next year back in oz.....

rojogarabatomagazine.tumblr.com/

soma sketches in progress

All sketches are in progress. surprise surprise~

this painting is a small detail of a much larger image. they are full length bodies. the same woman, different costumes. Fun to draw

I have been borrowing old life drawing sketches and laying them out in a composition. I want to do a copy of the composition and make them all absent, woven or porcelain. I am wanting to connect again to the physical, solid forms, a small healthy break from imagination or intangible,

Japanese Death Poems

Bokusui
A parting word? Jisei nado
The melting snow zansetsu ni ka mo
is odorless. nakarikeri


Enryo
Autumn waters Yoizame no
of this world wake me kore ya konoyo no
from my drunkenness. aki no mizu Fufu

Arimaru
Running shallow Kawa no se ni
with a year's end sound: shiwasu no oto no
river rapids. nagarekeri


Bill Viola is talking on the radio. He is talking about how much he loves Japanese Death Poems. Up until the 16th century, in Japan it was customary to write a Haiku poem moments before or on your death. An idea.... one that I will adopt, imagine the feelings, you cannot imagine.

He is also talking about Love in Postmodernism, or the absence of it. working backwards, like a super sleuth from sensation to theory.
I think I am now in love with Bill Viola

Soma/ Body

body

I know it seems basic, but when you are coming out of an existentialist high (like as if it the answer to all the problems of realities' limitations and you are so free..ahhh free like being trapped by open space and the claustrophobia of limitless imagination..arrgghhh) anyway like i said, basic. free, relief. loving painting bodies, movement, what is, outside of self...wonderful reality, to just observe. the movement of the brush loaded in pale sepia, to the heavy confident and straggly lines of charcoal like a web or heavy iron constructing the form. i am loving drawing.

so I am painting again. loving it. all thought is somewhere embedded in it. but not over it.

I will have the drawings up on walls before Christmas.

an excerpt: (not necessarily related)

The greek word for body, "soma"means corpse in homer. Soma is what is left lying on the field when the battle is over and the psyche has left the dead person. Only when Psyche is gone does Soma appear to be something different from it, and vice versa. But even if homeric man did not have an overall concept for the body in our sense that does not mean that the body was downgraded in relation to, for example, the mind. On the contrary.....a standard example is all the words for snow in an inuit languages, which also lack a single word for the concept 'snow'. If one is to think of greek cultureand pre socratic anthropology, one has to think in physical terms, and try to forget our body-mind divisionto avoid projecting it onto the homeric way of thinking. the body is the self for Homeric man. The term the greeks use for whole body is 'autos', self.

....In Homeric anthropology, it is impossible to distinguish and catergorically separate between the emotional, sensory and intellectual and rational the way we do. so there is no word that means 'reason' in homer'......

one of my favourite books that is taking forever to read, "A history of the Heart' by Ole M Hoystad.

NEXT TIME i want to write about the new book I found in a second hand bookstore last week. It's called 'Portrait of the lover" by Bettini (it's translated so it loses a lot. I guess I will just have to learn Italian (smile smile) domani domani!!!

imagine following a train of thought that traces the origin of displacing the lover, from real form to representation.( from Butades Daughter who stole the image of her lover by tracing his shadow on the wall (beginnings of clay sculpture) and made a statue out of clay) to Nietzsche and his concepts of shadow in Zarathustra....and so on and so on......sigh....oh so beautiful. this book is amazing, but yet to be read.