“To pay attention – this is our endless and proper work.”
This is the last line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Yes. No.”
The first line reads “How necessary it is to have opinions.”
If ever I can write my own epitaph, there! Either line. Or both.
She has done the work for me.
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Photographs above illustrate paintings by Altoon Sultan. She paints with egg tempera on wool and linen or on calfskin stretched over board. She is a painter who - judging by images of her earlier landscape work – decided one day to ditch a comfortable art language that she knew well.
I admire her courage and like her work the better for it.
I have nothing against landscapes – I’ve even met one or two that I quite liked although I can’t say I’ve ever owned one. But I would add “Pump Arm” to my art collection wall in a nano-second.
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I am reading THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES written by British ceramist Edmund de Waal. Barely past the prologue, I am hooked by the poetry of this writing.
The book deals with a collection of Japanese netsuke, small marble sized sculptures carved from stone, bone or wood meant to tuck into obis or to be used as toggles to close bags or simply to be cocooned in wool batting, then nestled in a beautiful box wrapped in exquisitely embroidered silk and tied ingeniously with narrow strips of reed for later discovery. How very un-Western! How very feminine!
(deWaal writes about his great-grandfather, Charles, who amassed this collection of over 200 netsukes in the late 1800s “He has a mistress. And he has started to collect Japanese art. These two things, sex and Japanese art, are intertwined.” Think about that for a while!)
Sigh! I am in think! What better place to be?
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