Whirling meditation

Moonlight:

tilted sunshine,

Finally,  a monster rock!
What am I doing to myself? Will my perception be altered by such playing with images? Creatures learn what they see. Kittens raised in a world of vertical stripes stumble over a horizontal stick.

I remember more clearly last spring’s photographs of mudflats, rather than the 3-D world out there. Would I now see 2-dimensionally walking along the Jadebusen at low tide? Is my view of the world altered by my photographs?

A year ago, reading about Cezanne, I wondered what prompted the strange perspectives of his landscapes. Oddly enough, Cezanne himself never found anything unusual in his manner of addressing perspective. Did he have an abnormality in his visual system? Did he poke fun at people asking him questions?

A more recent artist, Adolph Gottlieb – according to Wikipedia – first painted cacti and barren scenery in the desert. Next, he inserted mysterious incongruities into otherwise normal landscapes until finally, he ‘distilled his expansiveness into a more basic abstract form’. I would love to know whether he painted these abstractions from permutations of landscapes that evolved in his mind (without looking any longer at landscapes), or whether he began to actually see abstract shapes within the landscape.

To illustrate a simple poem, I went to a textile shop in the old garment center of Manhattan and bought the dull yellow linen for the background and patches of colorful silk. Troels was doubtful when I showed him the mix of colors and announced that they would turn it into a wall hanging (40 x55). Now, a few years later, he still likes the outcome.

The sowing was done by hand to avoid machine rattling so that Troels could enjoy the peace of Northern Michigan during the winter holidays. To the original shapes of the wall hanging, I added some symbols for events in our life such as the little piece of wool on the wrong side of the river, commemorating our dog.