Urban retreat and nervous system deregulation

Since my partner left on a business trip, I've been torn between doing a silent retreat back in my village, or just staying in the hellish city and trying to do the same – the upside here being that it saves me 2 days of travel and 2 additional days of anxiety/exhaustion around travel.  My …

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Zen sketches, unadulterated #1

In a previous post on ruining sketches, I deplored the state of affairs under which my finished paintings seem to please the eye and imagination less than my sketches. One way out of this could be improving my painting technique.  That may or may not happen 🙂 The lazier way, or as Masanobu Fukuoka might …

Celan and the mother tongue

I vaguely remember reading that Paul Celan, the Jewish-German poet born in Romania and going through the Shoah, had issues writing in German after the Holocaust.  That makes more than sense. Yet, wikipedia claims he said: "There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a …

Patriotic madonna #1

I was contemplating doing a copy of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa icon today.  The dark icon I remember from childhood in my beloved grandmother's bedroom, and which is in fact to be found in every authentic Polish grandmother's bedroom. The somber beauty of the original painting (marked by the scars which have a story) is  …

Incarnation

to K. For some of us it is really hard to incarnate. The world of structure, the world of ideas,  both logic and aesthetics are safer than the world of that which is inchoate, and does not speak in any human tongue.  It is the human, the bedrock of the human. (Although philosophers think words …

Ruining zen sketches on Dec 5

I frequently like my sketches much better than my finished paintings.  As mentioned in the previous post, I often prefer not to finish anything because my feeling is that adding more stuff will inevitably ruin it.  An example is provided below.  I enjoyed looking at this, vague landscape sketch. Leaving room for imagination. Pushed myself …

Sketch with monsters (Dec 5)

This started a week ago as spilling some red paint over a canvas to express some emotions of the same colour. There was initially a sketch of an animalistic monster and a madonna (the one from Haczów) in there, but I've covered it up in a forest of abstraction mostly.  I'm not sure I like …

The fine art of fruitful complaining

On a butoh retreat with many crazy artists in Italy, a Hungarian colleague remarked to me that I'm probably the most negative person he knows – I skilfully find something to complain about in any situation. He said he'd spent time in Poland (my patriotic fatherland) at one point and noticed that Polish people in …

Sensitivity is strength

I've just once again thought of changing the name of my blog. For one, not living up to it. For another, kind of a pretentious title.  Something absurd and witty perhaps.  Then a few days ago, I bumped into an article on "being too sensitive" on everydayfeminism.com. In the context of black people's emotional reactions to …