In memoriam: Jerrold S. Carton

Oh, boy! Jerrold is gone!

He was immensely gifted as a painter. He left marvelous paintings, (apparently) simple ones, true ones, some of the best realist paintings I know. No artsy-fartsy conceptual, avangardistic, abyssal etc. art. Just beautiful paintings, painted with talent and love. The paintings which usually get snobed by the “critics” and loved by the models and buyers. And, for all I know, my intuition tells me he was a good man…

I did not knew him personally… I met him on Sito (http://tinyurl.com/cxbplo) and for years we look up reciprocally the new paintings each of us posted.  We echanged ideas and appreciations and I just felt we were brothers in that Brotherhoo/Sisterhood of Art thing, Robert Henri speak of. But sometimes we do not need words to comprehend each other…

He was still young, of course. And now he’s wandering out there, in the beautiful landscapes he so well painted (Van Gogh would have liked, no doubt, some of his direct, SIMPLE (simple being the most complicated thing to get, a master thing)  or in the pure air around his portraits (some of the most wonderful being those of his daughters and wife). Every time I will miss him, I’ll go to SITO and look some more …

Here there are, some I like most:

So long, Jerrold, brother! We’ll meet again (tomorrow or in 20 years, who knows?) out there…

———————-

I hope Jeanne Carton will not be angry because I did not have (and didn’t ask) for copyright permission to publish these…

Zen in the Arts (Allan Watts) & new paintings

Here it is: a new fragment from the beautiful (and for artists, useful) essay of Watts… and also some of the paintings I`ve finished (or almost) lately…

…” Absence of hurry also involves a certain lack of interference with the natural course of events, especially when it is felt that the natural course follows principles which are not foreign to human intelligence. For, as we have seen, the Taoist mentality makes, or forces, nothing but “grows” everything. When human reason is seen to be an expression of the same spontaneuous balance of yang and yinas the natural universe, man’s action upon his environment is not felt as a conflict, an action from outside. thus the difference between forcing and growing cannot be expressed in terms of specific directions as to what should or should not be done, for the difference lies primarily in the quality and feeling of the action. The difficulty of describing these things for Western ears is that people in a hurry cannot feel.

The expression of this whole atitude in the arts is perhaps best approacehd through painting and poetry.

Although it may seem that the arts of Zen are confined to the more refined expressions of culture, it should be remembered that almost every profession and craft is known in Japan as a do, that is, a Tao or Way, not unlike what used to be known in the west as a “mystery”. To some extent, every do was at one time a lay method of learning the principles which are embodied in Taoism, Zen, and Confucianism, even as modern Masonry is a survival from times when the craft of the mason was a means of initiation into a spiritual tradition. Even in modern Osaka some of the older merchants follow a do or way of commerce based upon shingaku-a system of psychology closely related to Zen.

After the persecution of Chinese Buddhism in 845, Zen was for some time not only the dominant form of Buddhism but also the most powerful spiritual influence in the growth of Chinese culture. this influence was at its heights during the Southern SUNG dynasty (1127-1279), and during this time the Zen monasteries became leading centers of Chinese scholarship. Lay scholars, confucian and Taoist alike, visited them for periods of study, and Zen monks in turn familiarized themselves with Chinese classical studies. Since writing and poetry were among the chief preoccupations of Chinese scholars, and since the Chinese way of painting is closely akin to writing, the roles of scholar, artist, and poet were not widely separated. the Chinese gentleman-scholar was not a specialist, and it was quite against the nature of the Zen monk to confine his interests and activities to purely “religious” affairs. The result was a tremendous cross-fertilization of philosophical, scholarly, poetic, and artistic pursuits in which the Zen and Taoist feeling for “naturalness” became the dominant note. It was during the same period that Eisai and Dogen came from Japan to return with Zen to their own country, to be followed by an incessant stream of Japanese scholar-monks eager to take home not only Zen but every other aspect of Chinese culture. Shiploads of monks, amounting almost to flating monasteries, plied between China and Japon, carrying not only sutras and Chinese classical books, but also tea, silk, pottery, incense, paintings, drugs, musical instruments and every refinement of Chinese culture-not to mention Chinese artists and craftsmen.”

(c) Copyright for the images Dan Iordache, 2009

Zen in the arts and other stuff II

Things really fall into place… Just now I’ve seen an extraordinary performance of Bobby McFerrin (yes, that guy with Don’t Worry, Be Happy! by the way, in the video of Don’t worry one of the actors is another one of my most loved actors: Robin Williams!) at the Jazz Festival in Montreal! This guy is a genius and no doubt about it: he is himself a whole orchestra and he is also undoubtedly HAPPY!(I know one when I see one… and not dead at all! – there where rumors - mean rumors! – that he did commited suicide himself… HE DID NOT!) He’s doing what he likes and likes what he’s doing and there is probably no better solution to life…

Anyway… here it is another portion of Zen in the Arts by Allan Watts:

“Heaven and earth are alike members of this organism, and nature is as much our father as our mother, since the Taoby which it works is originally manifested in the yang and the yin – the male and female, positive and negative principles which, in dynamic balance, maintain the order of the world. The insight which lies at the root of Far Eastern culture is that opposites are relational and so fundamentally harmonious. Conflict is always comaparatively superficial, for there can be npo ultimate conflict when the pairs of opposites are mutually interdependent. Thus our stark divisions of spirit and nature, subject and object, good and evil, artist and medium are quite foreign to this culture.

In a universe whose fundamental principle is relativity rather than warfarethere is no purpose because there is no victory to be won, no end to be attained. For every end, as the world itself shows, is an extreme, an opposite, and exists only in relation to its other end. Because the world is not going anywhere there is NO HURRY. One may as well “take it easy” like nature itself, and in the Chinese language the “changes” of nature and “ease” are the same word, i. This is the first principle in the study of Zen and of any Far eastern art: HURRY, AND ALL THAT IT INVOLVES, IS FATAL. For there is no goal to be attained. The moment a goal is conceived it becomes impossible to practice the discipline of the art, to master the very rigor of its technique. Under the watchful and critical eye of the master one may practice the writing of Chinese characters for days and days, months and months. But he watches as a gardner watches the growth of a tree-the attitude of purposeless growth in which there are no short cuts because every stage of the way is both beginning and end. Thus the most accomplished master no more congratulates himself upon “arriving” than the most fumbling beginner.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and MISSES EVERYTHING. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.”

Zen in the arts and other stuff

Things are kind of falling into place for me, right now… Very turbulent and painful (I just corrected the word: I’ve wrote “paintful” , which, I suppose is kind of relevant psychanalitically…) times…My mother is sick (and 83) and other members of my family are given me (and them) hard times… But still, spring is coming, a squirel outside my window takes kangaroo poses, begging for food… and, somehow, I don’t feel as down as I should, normally, conventionally… I feel that all things, good and bad (so-called “good” and “bad” – our mania to label everything!) are part of a bigger thing (and I’m, too, a part of it…)

I go through my books – which is partially a bore but also a great pleasure! and finding things like Jack London’s and Steinbeck’s and Sebastien Japrisot’s (recently I’ve inaugurated my credit card  buying Adio, l’ami, the movie they made after Japrisot’s original screenplay, with Alain Delon and Charles Bronson… they’ve called it in English “Honour Among Thieves”...)

And also my “spiritiual” books: Mircea Eliade (Yoga and Immortality), Deepak Chopra (The Return of Merlin) and YES! Allan Watts`s, The Spirit of Zen! One of the first books on Zen and buddhism I`ve been fascinated and enthriled by…

And I realised, reading, here and there, in the 4th chapter, Zen in the Arts, that not only is this a great book but that it influenced me A LOT. So, I’ve decided, for those of my eventual readers, to copy some of it on my blog. (I’ve no idea if this infringe (?) some of the copyright law’s and stuff… I have no legal mind and no money whatsoever to pay fines… I do it, anyway, just for the pleasure of it… Maybe someone too will discover this great book and these great ideas…)

ZEN IN THE ARTS by Allan Watts

(fragments of the 4th chapter of “The spirit of Zen”)

Happily, it is possible for us not only to hear about Zen but also to see it. Since “one showing is worth a thousand sayings”, the expression of zen in the arts gives us one of the most direct ways of understanding it. This is the more so because the art forms which Zen has created are not symbolic in the same way as other types of Buddhist art, or as is “religious” art as a whole. the favorite subjects of Zen artists, whether painters or poets, are what we should call natural, concrete, and secular things. Even when they turn to the Bouddha, or to the Patriarchs and masters of Zen, they depict them in a peculiarly down-to-earth and human way. Furthermore, the arts of Zen are not merely or primarily representational. Even in painting, the work of art is considered not only as representing nature but as being itself a work of nature. For the very technique involves the art of artlessness, or what Sabro Hasegawa has called the “controled accident”, so that paintings are formed as naturally as the rocks and the grasses which they depict.

This does not mean that the art forms of Zen are left to mere chance, as if one were to dip a snake in ink and left it wiggle around on a sheet of paper. the point is rather that for the Zen there is no duality, no conflict between the natural element of chance and the human element of control. The constructive power of the human mind are no more artificial than the formativ actions of plants or bees, so that from the standpoint of Zen it is no contradiction to say that artistic technique is discipline in spontaneity and spontaneity in discipline.

The art forms of the Western world arise from spiritual and philosophical traditions in which spirit is divided from nature, and comes down from heaven to work upon it as an inteligent energy upon an inert and recalcitrant stuff. Thus Malraux speaks always of the artist “conquering” his medium as our explorers and scientists also speak of conquering mountains or conquering space. To Chinese and Japanese ears these are grotesque expressions. For when you climb it is the mountain as much as your own legs which lifts you upwards, and when you paint it is the brush, ink, and paper which determine the result as much as your own hand.

Taoism, Confucianism, and Zen are expressions of a mentality which feels completely at home in this universe, and which sees man as an integral part of his environment. Human intelligence is not an imprisoned spirit from afar but an aspect of the whole intricately balanced organism of the natural world, whose principles were first explored in the Book of Changes.”  (to be continued, eventually…)

The scarecrow principle

The scarecrow principle is that he has none. But he accepts all.

The same as he accepts everything else. It rains. Good. The sun is shinning. Ok. It snows. So what? He accepts it.

Old, stinky raggs clothes him. His old carcass is rotten and he is ridicoulous (or sinister, or whatever) with that fancy hat and all. People laugh at him.

Crows and other birds are scared of him (that the jist of it, no?)

But then they get used to him and start sitting on his shoulders. Or head. They even shit on him. So what? That’s life.

On the other hand, artists take him as a model. Some may even paint some bloody masterpiece with him as main character. They even wrote poems and made films with him. Big deal.

Since he was planted there, in the cornfiel (or wherever) he has to be there. No choice. No legs to take him far away. For what? Is there faraway any better? Maybe. Maybe not.

Either you stay put and the world whirls around you or you break the sound barrier in a fancy Porsche, what’s the difference? None, whatsoever.

The say – the Japanese, is it? – that you arrive at your destination when you cease to travel.

Anyway, the scarecrow accepts that too… He is. As simple as that. HE IS. As long as it takes…

Copyright text and image @ dan iordache, 2009

Telling the truth

To tell you the truth, I don’t know what «the truth» is. It might be something for me and something different – even totally different – for you.

To tell you the truth, I don’t care that much about the Truth. Write something with big letters and I get angry and, so to say, contrary.

Is this 2006 self portrait of mine, the truth? (since, let’s face it, almost all we are interested in is about us, our family, our opinions, our something...) Well, I would tell you that it was, somehow, truthfull, at the moment I did paint it. That angry little fellow, with visible (and much more ferocious teeth that the real, dangling, ones…) was me, too…

It is the truth, now? No way! For once, my teeth are dangling much more (no dental plan for poor artists) and I’m not that angry any more… I’ve accepted a lot of things: that I will die, too, along with my parents, my children, wife etc. No big deal. That I’m no Van Gogh – I never really believed I was something like Vincent because nobody IS somebody else… I accepted even that – if you are to believe some contemporary testimonies of some young French dandy – maybe Vincent was also the poor, lame guy, jerking off in the bushes, looking at what some more apt and more , maybe, lucky, fellows were doing in Arles’ parks, with their girlfriends…

I think you can be both: a sad jerkoff and a genius. One thing doesn’t eliminate the possibility of the other… Francois Villon was probably a cut-throat bandit AND one of the greatest POETS in French. And were Rimbaud or Verlaine better?

This too, doesn’t really matter. Just as it doesn’t matter much all this enourmous verbal diarrheea called Internet (don’t blame me! I just saw Untraceable, the movie with Diane Lane as a FBI agent trying to catch the Internet Killer; but it wasn`t really him who killed – he just made it possible – the real killer were guys like me and you (female guys included, of course) whom did opened the Killwithme site…)

To tell you the truth, I don’t know very much who I am anymore…what I will become… or what anyone else is or will become… Things aren’t looking too good for any of us…

But then: sometimes the sun is shining, the air – at least here in Quebec, where I live – is still respirable and sweet. Squirrels make a fuss every time temperature is lower than minus 5 Celsius. A skunk – for which I feel a irrepresible amitie - friendship (please! Do not psychanalise me and my skunks liking!) passes almost every night before my window. Sometimes, we look at each other and I try to convey to  him (or her) my sympathy. It seems to work since he (or she) did not, even once, rise his (or hers) tail…

And, for no reason at all, I’m happy. But then again: why do we need a reason to be happy?

I know I will continue to draw and to paint, maybe to write too. Because it gives me pleasure. (Bloody epicurean!) Maybe I will even finish my novel called Avatars, I do write in French for some time… Who knows? I might even win the bloody lottery tonight. No big deal there, either… I would  just gain some more latitude to travel and do things…

Lao-Tsu, more than 2500 years ago said (I think… they say...)  some very wise  things (somewhat obscure, although…).

One of them was that: “Those who know do not talk; those who talk, do not know.”
Well then, I’ve just proved to you I do not know, eh? (I adore this canadian “eh”! Just like I adore, without knowing very well why, the skunks…)

Birth of a painting…

After a few thousand of drawings and paintings, I still don’t know how, exactly, a painting is born…

But here there are 3 versions (chronologically succesives) of one of my latest painting: La Sarasina, Don Quixotte &  Don Sancho Panza… a long title but I like it… La Sarasina (ou Sarachina?) is the old prostitute, dansing the rumba in 8 1/2 de Fellini…and I know it’s not “Don” Sancho Panza (but I prefer it that way…)  Anyway, all these movie – literary dipshit doesn’t count…

I kind of like this last creature of mine… Don’t ask me if it’s “finished”… I haven’t the faintest… I might even ruin it…

Of course, copyright@2009, dan iordache

Small progress…

As it happens, things weren’t so good as I hoped…But no big deal, as I already said… I did read a bit (Watts, some books about St. Francis d’Assissi and even some Hasek and alphonse Allais…) and I’ve also draw and paint a bit. I even made some progress, , with my Mona Lisa.

And started a few new ones…

I just take it easy, trying to survive this winter, enjoying the air not as cold as in December, with smells of wood smoke…

No big deal…

Seems that my second job will be just an ex hope, deflating each day more… No big deal…

But, as I can see more each day, one can find a good thing in any “bad” thing (and vice-versa) which is another way to say that there are no real bad or real good things. Only our own atitude makes them bad or good… So, I have more time to draw, paint and write…I’ll start again to post a bit, here and there…

Today, I will post 2 new old things: a landscape I’ve re-worked after 10 years! (intesified the colors, mostly) and which was inspired from a Henri Cartier – Bresson photo from 1933 (if remember well…a Trieste landscape)… and, another landscape, entirely mine, this time, which I also re-worked, a bit, since I will give it as a present to my good, young friends Michael & Jolyane…

I hope you’ll like them… but if you don’t… it’s ok. No big deal…

x

A time for Everything

It is said there is a time for everything…

Well, just now, for me, it is the time to make a pause – short I hope – in my activity as a blogger. and not only: I will draw and paint some (otherwise I will be depressed or/and jumpy!) but not much… Good things happen in my life right now and I try to savurate them…in silence.

I certainly hope my friends – known and unknown – will not totally and for ever desert me… I will come back, sometime…

Be good. Be wise, if you can. And last but not least, VOILA! my adaptation to the Kazanzakis epitaph (I will demand to my family to put it to mine, too):

REGRET NOTHING. HOPE NOTHING. FEAR NOTHING. BE FREE…

Be free: Kazanzakis

A few nights ago I woke up about 3 AM (it happens often). I woke up with the thought that I must search for the exact words of Nikos Kazanzakis’s epitaph… I’ve search the Internet and I found out more than I looked for…

This has nothing or not much to do with painting but it has a lot to do with myself, as an artist, as a person. I’ve always liked enormously Zorba the Greek, the film and (to re-read!) the book of Kazanzakis, one of the greatest writer not only of modern Greece but of the whole universal literature. A great writer, a writer whom almost got the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. (One vote difference! Albert Camus, whom did get the prize declared that Kazanzakis deserved it 100 times more than himself!)

A greek from Crete island, a man who traveled the world, a man who wanted engraved on his grave the following epitaph (by the way, the greek-Ortodox popes of Crete forbid his body to be buried in a regular cemetery! He is lying somewhere outside the “sacred” grounds, just like those who committed suicide, the antiChrists and the murderers…They say he was an heretic and such… I love him for that, too…) :

“I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I’m free.”

(One day, if everything goes well, I will bring a flower to his outlawed grave. I have one more place to visit, in my dreams first, then, who knows? in reality. Just like the Toledo of Greco. Just like the Toscane of Leonardo. Or Portugal… Or Vence, in the south of France, the place of Matisse and Dallaire and Chagall…)

He is also the man who wrote in one of his last book, “Report to Greco” (another great Cretan! And a painter!):

“I thank God that this refreshing childhood vision still lives inside me in all its fullness of color and sound. This is what keeps my mind untouched by wastage, keeps it from withering and running dry. It is the sacred drop of immortal water which prevents me from dying. When I wish to speak of the sea, woman, or God in my writing, I gaze down in my breast and listen carefully to what the child within me says. He dictates to me; and if it sometimes happens that I come close to these great forces of the sea, woman, and God, approach them by means of words and depict them, I owe it to the child who still lives within me. I become a child again to enable myself to view the world always for the first time, with virgin eyes. “

I found in his words great inspiration. I wanted to share this with my known and unknown friends. They can also, maybe, find his ideas and words inspiring. As for me, personally, I’ve adapted his epitaph and wrote in big words on a paper, pinned down before my bed. Every morning I woke up to these words:

“Hope nothing. Fear nothing. Be free.”

My almost final Mona Lisa

There it is, my almost final Mona Lisa… I’ve finished it (some small details still to change) the 31 of December 2008, the 113 work I’ve done last year. Not an extraordinary number and nothing absolutely stunning either…Just another year…

My life changed a bit – for the better, in certain ways – and I will be a lot more concise (which is not a bad thing, maybe…) in my posts…

Mona Lisa – Gabrielle, is just a painting I had to finish and I’ve changed it only in small ways (a raven, for instance)… I hope you, my readers, will like it.

And a Happy New Year!

Salam cu soia/ Soya Salami

This will be a weird post for an art/painting blog. You can sense it from the title, aren’t you?

But then, the artist I am today is also the result of all my past experiences… and the soya salami is one of them… I also have to warn those who have sensible, tender hearts, that I will publish a very troubling image, a photo of a dead child. For me this is an anniversary and an homage. I cannot do otherwise… so, if you have a too tender a heart, don’t look at this…

Today, 22 of december 2008, they are celebrating (in a way) 19 years since the 1989 “revolution”, the turning point in Romania’s recent history. And in my private, modest history, too…

A week, more or less, in my peacefull, provicial town of Sibiu, Transylvania, Kalashnikov’s and bazookas, 16 mm machine guns and Carpatzi pistols, armoured cars and even tanks, transformed the city in a war zone. The army was “fighting” terrorist (very few or none of those were really seen…but lots of civilians and some miliatia men and even some soldiers lost their lives and got wounded; the numbers I remember are: about 92 dead and about 300 wounded…)

One of the victims was this young boy (5-6 years old) called, as far as I know ( a lot of confusion and lies circulated those days…) Radu. He was killed in a cross fire when his parents, his 8 months pregnant mother and his father (supposed to have worked at the continental Hotel, the most modern in town) tried to force, with their car, a check point in order to get out of Sibiu. I don’t know why they did such a stupid, irresponsable thing. The army and the “revolutionaries” were very very trigger happy those days. And they had a licence to kill (nobody gave them that actually but they had the Kalashnikovs so they did not need permission…) Radu ended with a bullet in his head and one in his little belly. His mother was also wounded (but survived). The father got away, running for his life.

I took this photo at the city morgue, the 26 or 27 th of December, when most of the “fighting” (shooting would be a better term, maybe, since the army didn’t know very well whom they were “fighting” if you don’t consider a boogey-man like “the terrorists” a fighting back partner…)

For me, that was the all powerful proof of the stupidity and total evilness of all wars and “revolutions” and, no wonder, marked me for life. It also started my “journalistic” career since I wrote a short piece to be published with this photo in the local newspaper (”Tribuna”, totally communist a few days back, totally “revolutionnary” once Ceausescu and his wife executed…) They published it all right even if censored… It was a very pathetic and poetical text, in fact, mostly a list of all the things the little boy Radu would not do any more, because of the stupidness of adults, playing with guns…

Then, of course, I did not understood the events like I am now, with the 19 years decanting the facts and impressions…

Paradoxically, the soya salami was very much the symbol of the hated communist regime, the trade mark of dictatorship… Years after 1989, Romanians from abroad, runaways of the communist regime were told with reproach: “Yes, but you didn’t eat soja salami!”

Now I know that the soya salami was better for Romanians health than the all meat salami. And that probably Ceausescu, imposing that kind of salami to people, had very good intentions (misunderstood, of course)…

Just like those soldiers and “revolutionnaries”, at the checkpoint, those who killed Radu and wounded his mother, had, they too, the best intentions in the world…
(Copyright for the text and photo,@Dan Iordache, 2008)