Messing with representational painting preserving the fun of the abstract #1

My recent project is to go from copying to painting without any models, based on imagination and memory.  The copied work so far certainly looks more decent (see here). However, it's also annoying to not be able (or scared) to just paint visual thoughts, dreams and visions, and these things.  I've spent quite a long …

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Guitar meditation #2 and autistic learning curves

https://soundcloud.com/sasha_tramp/longer-morning-guitar-meditation I've been trying to teach myself various musical instruments since I was a kid.  I think I tried to play guitar for the first time probably in primary school; as soon as my dad had one. There were always guitars in the house, in an era before youtube or even CD players, when my …

Doctor of philosophy

That's the title of a (Polish) jazz record my guitar teacher made. (In 2014, the time when I was seeking self, meaning and homeland in dusty & martyrological Warsaw and on the side benefitted from spending the British pounds I'd shnorred from the last PhD scholarship on professional guitar lessons with an actual jazz musician …

Thoughts on guitar #1

Apparently the phase for images has passed.  Wave of words has ebbed.  Yet, somehow a person is to go on thinking, and it seems like thoughts are inclined to take the shape of sound. [improvised track, as I will probably remain forever quite unable to read music or memorise songs] https://soundcloud.com/sasha_tramp/guitar_thoughts_dec_12 I also have various …

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 …

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 …