Museums and reverie

phone-doodled portraits of 4 famous artists

Mostly, people talk about one thing (at a time), but I'd like to talk about two and see whether they can be connected. It's like a game of logic. I want to continue with my fascination with collecting and with museums. One of my favourite museums is the Meir Agassi Museum. Among other things, Agassi collected invented artists, the biography of whom he would write in great detail. Like Hokusai, he hid his versatility by choosing different pseudonyms. I thought about doing that myself, and decided against it, embracing all the facets of me under the umbrella of me. I chose to be, in a way, my own museum. Now, for theme number two: a few months ago I read an article in Psychologies mourning the end of reverie. It claimed that through the constant fidgeting with mobile phones, social networks, etc., boredom is now officially dead - the downside of it being the disappearance of reverie (daydreaming instead of fidgeting) that is so necessary for our creativity. I think that whether you want to reverie or not is entirely up to you and that fidgeting could be catalogued and displayed in your own museum, becoming material for inspiration and further thought. Of course, it could also be a mandala, swept away by background noise.

The art of looking sideways

I have been wandering, if not aimlessly, rather soullessly, through meanders and mazes of little sense, searching for that inspiration, or even for that desire for inspiration, that makes my journey through life an exciting and adventurous one. So, in this state of depletion, I entered the library yesterday and found a huge tome, called The Art of Looking Sideways. It is a most irritating piece of work, as it is written in all directions, weighs a ton, tells stories that are too long, and has quotations. But. It suddenly woke me up from my torpor. I can do this too, I thought, play with images, words, type, aimlessly, but now in a positive way, wandering through the same or different meanders, randomly collecting flowers, pebbles, ideas, dreams, obsessions, distortions. And then put it all in a book, a big irritating book that weighs a ton, for my own benefit, or yours or nobody's. But doing it. Perhaps I'll call it The art of doing.

I discussed this with Diana drinking cappuccino.

Goodbye, Dad

On January 25th my Dad passed away. He was buried in Venice, on the island of San Michele, in his in-laws' family tomb. My granny used to take me to that cemetary as a child to visit grandad. There were toy cans that you would fill at the fountains to water the flowers on the tombs, and tall cypresses, so somber, they looked like arrows pointing at the heavens above. I remember that place as peaceful and dreamy. I hope my Dad has found there the peace he so much deserved. Goodbye, Dad, you will be missed.

Pause for reflection... sort of

When I am busy with long translations, as I am now, by the end of the day I'm too "worded out" to find the energy to blog or start any creative project. So, it's a time for reflection, in which I lazily flick though art books. The one I'm flicking through at the moment is a colossal volume: Mariscal Drawing Life, and I'm finding eeeerie similarities with some of my stuff:

Mariscal

Me (before knowing Mariscal)

Old pictures

Was this my very first encounter with photography? I'm scanning tons of negatives, restoring pictures to a glory they actually never had, thanks to the power of digital. Old images are fascinating, full of bizarre details that go past the personal sense of history and belonging. Note the star fish next to my foot!

The only visible change in Venice is in children's fashion...

Venice

Venice was grey and white with fog and drizzly rain. I hadn't been there in winter since I was a little girl. It was strangely deserted, perhaps all the tourists are waiting for the carnival. We had intermittent heating in the flat, wearing heavy coats we searched drawers filled with forgotten histories, including this photographic plate that I managed to scan, a family portrait of some ancestors I know nothing about. Memory lane was sore and sweet, everything slightly or drastically different from how we remembered it, but in a way it didn't matter, as we still belonged, somehow, to it all.

The BIg Sleep

To celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary we went to see The Big Sleep last night. I hadn't seen an old b&w film at the cinema for I don't know how many years. It's fascinating to see how little we've learned about filmaking since! The lighting was incredible and the settings perfect, every single prop had a reason to exist, such attention to detail. Really amazing. The clothes and makeup were beautiful. I've done a lot of period films as a background artist and we were never given clothes of that fit and quality. But then again not many of us have Bacall's waistline. What were women eating in those days to have such perfect bodies? Or were they eating? Of course in Europe there wasn't a great deal of food going around at that time, but I don't know about America. My grandmother kept a piece of bread from the wartime to show it to me and my sister when we were kids. I understood more about war from looking at that black, sad piece of stale bread then from what I was taught in school.