Kurt Vonnegut

A carpenter was commissioned to build some boxes for a SPCA cat shelter. This is what he did. He did not even bother to pretend to do a half decent job.

This guy have a three-year apprenticeship, cutting pieces of wood, using a drill, sandpaper and a saw. Screws juts out on the inside of the cages, the doors do not close. Distressed animals will injure themselves on these. I could have done a better job! It would have taken me ages, but I would have done a better job.

I was a teaching assistant at the university college, and one of my students came whining one day, that he had to read. That there was books with words in them. That he was expected to read. He actually said, and I quote, “I canna do it! I try! I open the first page and there are all these words!”

I smiled sweetly and said, “well maybe you should do something else. Maybe you should become a bus driver or a carpenter instead”. He was deeply offended, his classmates rekindled their hatred of me.

I regret that comment now. It turns out you can be as incompetent as a carpenter, as you could be unfit for anything vaguely academic, such as reading. The difference between rubbish carpentry and shoddy academic work is depressingly obvious. A bad house will fall down. A bad thesis will have no impact on anything. You can set fire to both, though, and you probably should.

Art can be made out of any old rubbish. Craft cannot. If you are not in fine art, you are in craft, and there is a quality gauge. If you cannot sign your work with excellence, at least do not inflict injury on homeless kittys.

Old iron posts of various types have imprints. They are either mirrored or the right way around, but something in the style tells me this is old. How old, I have not the faintest idea. I imagine old posters used ink that somehow etched itself into the paintwork. Apart from the gorgeous textures and a whiff of history, I would like to know what was announced, when and how. In the two pics above, I can spot a street name “dalsbergstien”, a map and a skate. It should – in theory – be possible to find out when these posts were last painted.

The posts are seriously worn, and I suspect might be removed soon.

“våpen” (weapons)

Paulus plass (paulus’ square, a square on the other side of town, across the river)

This smiley – and font – seems rather old-fashioned.

Then, the second mystery; I did not realise it was one until I got home:

A sticker, announcing a company called “AS Hjalmar Bjørge”… first: what thought was that, to announce offshore charter, sales & purchases on lampposts around town?! Subliminal advertising?! Thing is: the phone number and postal code tells me this sticker is from before 1992, when Oslo changed the phone numbers from six to eight digits. The telex is a nice touch.

A fascinating thing about this, is that I cannot find any real nor historical information on this company. And the logo is just epic.

Any suggestions as to the origins of these little strangeness’es would be welcome, and any similar things from other places would be fun. I hope the posts stays. I love Oslo for this quirkiness.

(by Lars)

I haven’t touched a pencil or a brush in years. Not properly, not committedly. But in this situation of pressure, essays to write, video to edit, processes to define, compose, structure, books to read, technology to decipher, articles to consume – here, now, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a deep melancholy need to find out – do I still have it? Is it really part of me?
Once it is established that so-and-so is good at this-or-that, it is hard to rock those perceptions, and I was always defined as “good at drawing”. A blessing and a curse.
But drawing is about practice, a collaboration between hand, heart and head, it is about proportions, about light. It is about shapes and negative space and intuition, but most of all it is about shadows.

(“Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act falls the Shadow”).

Most books that teach drawing start out with sketches of The Whole. I have always started in one corner and worked my way around haphazardly. A dangerous strategy, as it might not add up, when you connect lines at the other end of the page. The secret lies in those tiny shadows and getting them right. Then it will add up, and I will have finished a drawing of a whole I haven’t really looked at until it is finished. It is a little magic, it is deep meditation, but I doubt it is art.
Tricky things to draw: glass, water, hands. I always come back to hands. They never look right, but sometimes they are. Look at your own, see the fingers foreshortened, twist a little, and you’ll realise that good old Michelangelo was not far off.

But do I still have it?
I fumbled a little. It got better. I did a few hands, and the last ones had that familiar quality. Recognisably my hand, nicks and scars included; familiar handiwork. Drawing a beat-up transparent plastic bottle at an angle was a tad early, it seems a little practice will do it.
I am comforted; I am relieved. I am also hooked again.
It is not great art, but it is solid craft, decent draftsmanship.

Good enough for me.
_____________________

as a ps. A current work in progress. I’ll leave portraits for a bit, methinks.

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The kiln fires the gooey, soft, sensual clay into stone; it is a non-reversible process, and the object dies a little for me – I tend to lose interest in the finished product. It is the clay part of the process, and firing kilns that attracts me. The transformation is total, the pot will never leave earth, it cannot be broken down to the original materials. Ages hence, my pottery shards will still be around. Longevity. Infinity. A mindblowing thought – and one that (should) keeps potters constantly reminded to not fire substandard pots in the first place. We won’t get rid of them.

The few pots that lives for me, have that magic all potters hunt for: that perfect, perfect balance of shape, texture and colour.

It sounds simple. It is impossible. It is chasing stars and fog. It is processes with so many uncontrollable variables you cannot do anything else but expect the unexpected. To make it really easy for myself, I fell in love with the microcrystalline glazes. The initiated will laugh at this. Microcrystallines will keep you pulling out your hair for the rest of your life. It will ruin the kiln shelves, it will stick, run, be too thin, too thick; the pot too high, thick, thin, small. The kiln fires too evenly, not evenly enough, there will be tiny variations in the core temperature, there will be a draught. When they work, they are gorgeous, though. From a full kiln, I’d be extraordinary happy to get one single pot that lives.

There is a virtue in it too, to control what you can, and then be able to leave yourself at the mercy of chance. Passing that point, imposing will is not so important anymore.

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There is not a lot of photos from this period in my life. Fine electronics do not go well with clay, dust, glazes and blazing kilns.
But memories are good too.

microcrystalline green tea bowl

microcrystalline blue glaze – “purple perhaps”

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newly thrown plates, before turning

the dead fish is my stamp, id and trademark

I was never big on moulding and modelling, but Gregory is always nearby

googly espresso mugs

I was never a fan of symmetry. Throwing wobbly pots is in fact incredibly difficult

bark

roof

wall

house

table

concrete

door

-Douglas Hofstadter-

What on earth is it? No one can give a vaguely sensible answer to what goes on in my brain. It is non-stop, it goes on every waking hour, and, I suspect, when I sleep as well. It is a constant rattling, a background noise in my head: constantly having new ideas, judging colours, angles, texture, making connections, soaking up words or phrases in any situation. Connecting bizarre things together; finding some hue, taste or sound that bring unrelated things together in my head, spanning languages, centuries, words, colours, poetry, sounds, materials, buildings, life forms; from teaspoons to magma. It is exhausting, in a way, but it’s been going on my whole life, so I have no idea what it would be like without it.
It makes me able to make metaphors no one understands. How admirable.

Bits of paper, books with notes in the margins, or the last blank pages missing to some long forgotten desperate need for scribbling something. Piles of notebooks half filled out with unidentifiable ideas, but sometimes, sometimes a notebook contains a tiny little doodle that have it. Some magic little quality.

And there it is – a perfect little doodle or a surprising combination of letters or words. Something that it would be impossible to improve on. Adding something would ruin it. A doodle; born perfect. An interaction of letterforms in perfect balance and meaning. Trying to do it again would not work.
Magic.

I can track a meeting through the doodles I make. I remember what was said from little squiggles. People who have not seen my meeting-doodles show me endless post-its with circles repeated endlessly and say, I do it too! No you don’t. Because my doodles – unconsciously – covers and span universes. They are bizarre, funny, sometimes scary, sometimes awful. often abstract. I am sure a psychologist would have a field day, but at least it keeps me awake through boring meetings. The doodles are an illustration of the noise that goes on in my head – forced to sit still and listen to some boring twat go on about strategies for the future and how to fix something that is not broken – the endless connecting process bursts out on paper.

And I am beginning slowly to realise that not everybody have this racket going on. In fact, very few people have the faintest idea what I am talking about.
So I wonder what goes in their heads.

In europe, the oldest fabrics are all dyed in shades of red. In fact, they say, in Roman times, the latin word for ‘coloured’ and ‘red’ were synonyms. Greeks and romans rarely dyed in blue, but the celts and germanic tribes did – using woad (that yellow plant you see all around temperate europe). Hence, blue was seen as primitive and barbaric.

Blue dye were used by the ancient people of the Middle East. They imported indigo from Asia and Africa. Indigo was used in biblical times, but it was expensive, and used only for the finest cloth, and for the wealthy. In europe, it was not used much, partly because it was expensive, but also because the colour was not … appreciated. It was also assosiated with the rabid celts and germanic people (Don’t say Braveheart – I detest that film. But I suppose the blue is correct).

In the bible, colour is rarely mentioned, but translations have made words that relate to luminosity, density, light and quality into colours. This of course, have ended in a lot of – to an atheist – delightful, snickering misunderstandings in the «life of Brian»-genre («it’s a sign, it’s a sign! he wants us all to remove our left shoe and follow!»)

The best bit is that in the english version (and others), words that describe force, richness, love, beauty, prestige, death, blood, fire etc are simply translated as «red». Excellent ground for misunderstandings… and I shall not even start on the jewish tsitsit shawl, Cleopatra’s sails or the temple of Solomon. Brilliant stories they are – go forth and research!

The high middle ages is a period we can begin to recognise the outlines of our own society and you should think that at least the painters would use blue. The sky is blue. We see the sea as blue (which it is not), but the painters in the high middle ages painted the sky white, red or gold. Emperors and nobles in the 9-10th century fancied Roman customs, and wore red, white and purple (purple is another story – an enormously fascinating one!). So ignored by nobles, blue was worn by pesants. And it would stay like that until the 12th century.. Blue was described by the rich and wealthy as sickening, unnatural, barbaric and ugly.
(is’t this exciting?!)

There are remarkably few references to blue in liturgy, placenames and people. Mr. Brown, Mr. Black, Mr White, Mr. Red. But no Mr. Blue. In latin, there are apparently no name with the root in ‘blue’ (this of course being contagious, the same goes for a lot of european languages).

Christianity: you would think that with all that emphasis on the heavens and all, christianity would expand blue. But no, the church stuck to the social and religious symbolisms already in place for regulating society.

Liturgical colours are discussed in sheaves and reams, and all sorts of colours are mentioned- except blue. Even though it is around in stained glass, enamel, paintings and in clothing. Blue is simply not part of the liturgical colour scheme or symbolism. Blue is not really entering the stage properly until the late 12th century… when blue turns up in stained glass windows, and then only as a backdrop to sacred figures.

Up until the 12th century, the virgin Mary was depicted in dark colours, to represent suffering and grief, and never in blue. Then something happens, and today, blue is associated with the virgins robes. A good example is the Wilton dipthych from 1395.
This combination of the cult of Mary and the idea of divine light, blue becomes wildly popular. (It is of course a long story, what happended – it involves an squillon church meetings, a split on the view on colours – «if colours are light, it is divine, the work of God. If colour is substance, it is the work of the deceiving devil»…. chromophobes versus chromophiles, with axes to grind, a God to justify them, and unproveable points to prove… Besides. Ultramarine pops up in Italy as the most expensive colouring. Money talks).

Colours change importance and associative power. Blue changed from being a non-colour to represent loyalty, truth, courage, and the fact that the king of France chose the well-known coat of arms: azure with golden fleur-de-lis dotted around (and yes, king Arthur pictured with a blue shield with three golden crowns) surely drove the popularity of blue.
And here’s a good piece of ancient gossip: in the thirteenth century, wealthy red dyers asked stained-glass artists to represent the devil as blue, hoping this would discredit the newly fashionable colour that was threatening their precious profits. From hardly any coats of arms having any blue in 1200, at the beginning of the 15th century one in three coats of arms had ‘azure’.

In fact, there was a fight whether the colours of the rainbow should include blue – and the fact that indigo is squeezed in between blue and violet, well, that seems to be more thanks to stubborn Newton than anything else.
…since then, blues popularity have, erm, sky-rocketed. Today, it’s topping the favourite colour scale.

And by the way- blue is not just blue…: Azure, baby blue, cerulean, cobalt, cornflower, dark blue, denim, Egyptian blue, electric blue, indigo, light blue, lapis lazuli, Maya blue, midnight blue, navy blue, periwinkle, Persian blue, powder blue, prussian blue, royal blue, sapphire, sky blue, steel blue, ultramarine…

And no, it’s not my favourite colour.

(Purple is facinating, though. Royal tyrian, slaves, snails and religious blunders.. and yellow – to us, a warning, the colour of hospital bin bags signifying harmful contagious waste; to the chinese, the colour of the emperor. Ah. it never ends.)

(all images either own or from wikipedia)