Catalogue published by Peter Noser Galerie, Zürich, 1987.
A selection of notes and quotations in sketchbooks over the period covered by the works in the exhibition.
on balance
my balance
a balanced relationship
maintaining a balance
balancing it up
holding a balance
off balance
unbalanced
keeping it in balance
balanced judgement
In «Meditations at 10,000 Feet» by James Trefil – an essay «Twisted Trees», a contemplation of how symmetry arises and disappears.
Doppelganger
Janus faced
two face/two faced/symmetry
masked/double life/Deacon Brodie
«Doubles», Karl Miller
«The Justified Sinner», James Hogg
«Jekyll and Hyde», Robert Louis Stevenson
Lovis Corinth had right hemisphere brain damage, and was claimed by some to be more expressive after this.
Handedness in biological systems is something not yet understood.
out face
putting on a face
facing up
on the face of it
muscles of facial expression
Wrinkles as drawings (engravings) of moods and emotions expressed and supressed.
cartoon drawing
Lines of force of an object dropping or taking off fast.
The wobbly lines indicating fear.
Giacometti talked of how a person familiar to us is recognisable from a great way off by their movements.
The rhythms of walk or posture expressing happiness, boredom, depression – even by just the angle of the shoulders.
weeping willow, pine, poplar
The process of imagination and memory are never pure of one another.
«For the spiritual artist colour and brushwork sufficiently represent matter.»
Mondrian
Both eastern music and ancient epics use the on-going repetition of a phrase or refrain.
«A light touch on the arm, the slightest change in pressure or movement, produce a host of different messages and moods.»
Jon Schueler
stroke, caress, rub
«The frailty and vulnerability of civilization, that thin and precious crust created by the personality and will of the few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved.»
John Maynard Keynes
Luftmenschen – «airmen, living on nothing.»
«Some Conversations with Myself», piano piece, Thelonious Monk
«Samuel Beckett interviewed by a French journalist: «Vous êtes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?» To which Beckett replied: «Au contraire.»»
Seamus Heaney
Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Agnes Martin
Early in 1916 Matisse wrote to André Derain that their friend Demetrius Galanis had just finished reading Henri Poincaré’s «La Science et l’Hypothèse» «in which he has found the origin of Cubism!….Have you read this book? There are some hypotheses in it that have a dizzying audacity, the one at the end for example, on the destruction of matter. It’s true that Poincaré says that the proof of this is not yet complete…»
A painting touch alone become a surface show, a style affectation – Glaswegians say of Edinburgh people that they wear «fur coats wi’ nae knickers.»
The palm a symbol of victory over death, incised on early Christian tombs, BIKTWPIA – written below.
«Language stops where understanding begins.»
Wittgenstein