I will wait for you (Il Mio Canto)

When the Sun rises…

I will wait for you…

 I will wait for you.

Sketching in Milano and Venezia

Venezia. January 2012. Ink on hand.book paper.

Rosetum, Milano, built in Lombard style in 1896. Graphite on hand.book paper.

SketchBloom receives the Liebster Blog Award!

What a fantastic way to start the Year!

The Liebster Blog Award is an award given to bloggers by bloggers, and is reserved to ‘upstart’ blogs with less than 200 followers.
It originated in Germany and its meaning is ‘beloved’, or favorite.<3
It was bestowed to me by the Kuwaiti artist (und blogschwester!) Ghadah Alkandari at PrettyGreenBullet, whom I consider a role model as a 360 degree artist and blogger.
Needless to say it is a great honor to receive this, and more to receive it from Ghadah.

Check out her other awardees, it is blog goodness at its BESTE!

I in turn will have to bestow the award onto five upstart bloggers, so stay tuned, deliberations have just started.

Venezia e Dintorni e Calatrava

Venice makes you question the idea of "impossible".

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Winter Venice

In the winter, Venice is like an abandoned theatre. The play is finished, but the echoes remain.

Arbit Blatas

To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.

Alexander Herzen

There is something so different in Venice from any other place in the world, that you leave at once all accustomed habits and everyday sights to enter an enchanted garden.

Mary Shelley

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

Erica Jong

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand.

Lord Byron

…

A train-ride takes you from Milano to Venice..whose real name is Venezia, the Most Serene city and splendid, golden Republic. On the train you think about Byron, his letters written on trains, his Venetian Countess.

Through frozen fields and dormant earth, through fog and long-gone rice paddies , you deboard to the Sublime.

At dusk the lights from bars and cafes shimmer on the dark waters, and you start thinking in cliches, such as temporarily inhabiting an Impressionist painting.

Yet the feeling is fresh and true: each visit to this surrealists’ dream had its poignant moment of suspension of disbelief.

Each time the city grabs you and takes you away with her.
…
Here’s a taste of today’s acts of flanerie in La Serenissima.

Dispatches from Milano

Crocheting Cathedrals. Il Duomo with parasitic architecture (stage for New Year's festivities). Ink and watercolor on hand.book paper. December 31, 2011.

Aperol and Spritz. Most of the older ladies in my neighborhood are incredibly fashionable, decked in the latest trend winter coat. Here's two enjoying a mildly alcoholic aperitivo at 11 AM. Ink on hand.book paper. December 31, 2011.

Santa Maria Presso San Satiro. The obligatory pilgrimage to the second Bramante's church. Last year I drew Santa Maria Delle Grazie, which is near to my place. I am always amazed by the playfulness and modernity of the oculi (round windows) on the Northern Romanesque facade. I found out that the space in front of the church is called 'Largo Jorge Luis Borges'. Can it get better than this?
Ink on hand.book paper. December 31, 2011.

Window of the Pio Albergo Trivulzio. In an act of Flanerie, I got lost trying to reach the Roseto, and found these whimsical, almost Gaudi-like windows on a palazzo I had not seen since my childhood, painted in the typical warm 'Milanese Yellow' (think saffron rice and add a patina of melancholy, smog and time). Ink on hand.book paper. January 1, 2012.

Holly Days

S C A T T E R  J O Y

Wishing a Luminous 2012…The World Over.

Happiness

“…and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?” 

Vincent van Gogh

Fragments {and a Cashmere Wrap}

Dream before Nonno died. He was a fisherman. Ink on notebook paper, 2003.

Fragments {and a cashmere wrap}

The cashmere wrap finally arrived in the mail

so much weighs on this stole

‘opportunity a thief makes’

he said before giving me homework

– how we love.

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep”

Saul Bellow

A lot weighs on this stole:

conversation is rippled with diamonds

they tumble , heavy, they are words, quotes

…out of the mundane…

a pearl – grasp it and keep it.

Wisdom is the only jewelry I wear this season

and my greediness awaits

meaning.

He who grasps more than he can hold, would be better without any.

If a house is crammed with treasures of gold and jade,

it will be impossible to guard them all.

Lao Tzu

Did you hear the sound of wisdom, Heart?

The message you sought.

My only wealth is my memory.

Like a mendicant I gather precious words,

fragments of light that I bring back,

puzzles I spend days composing.

- You, collector of spirit, feeder of souls.

Everyone wants to go to Heaven, no-one wants to die.

The falcon, scarred wing, alighted the sill.

– the magpies, once they have caught the prey,

lose interest

and look around for the next creature to pursue-

Yogis come and go,

grasp their message

Catch leaves in the wind

take them home, make a nest.

Heaven is simple:

let go of anything that is not love or peace.

San Diego, December 15, 2011

Nostalgia, or The Last American Tailor

San Diego, December 14, 2011.

To Paint Again (and being an artist)

New painting's "Underpainting". December 6th, 2011. Acrylic on Canvas.

I started to paint again. And now, I cannot believe i have been away from my brushes and tubes for so long. I set-up a makeshift easel in the kitchen, by the window, a little corner of happiness.

Where this new painting will go might surprise you.

Sunday, I found joy in heading to my neighborhood’s art store to buy white paint. All my old little guys are there, sketchbooks, papers, paints…and now a new jewelry section! I bought some new clasps for my wire crochet pieces.

Will post progress updates.

 

 

Art is neither a profession or hobby. Art is a Way of being.

Frederick Franck

Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic.

Pablo Picasso

Being an artist means : not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree,

which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storm of spring,

not afraid that afterward summer may not come.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems,

like notes that shape music.

Joan Miro’

Napkin Sketch

Pen on bar napkin, December 5, 2011.

Love The Questions II

Ink, pastel, and acrylic paint on newsprint paper.

Love the question as though rooms lit at night, never visited.

Love The Questions

November 28, 2011.

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything.

Live the questions now.

Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke “Letters to a Young Poet”

A Blessing

Marker and pencil. November 2011.

Ring the bells that still can ring,

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

Paris in and after the rain

Having lived in Paris unfits you for living anywhere, including Paris.

John Ashbery (quoted in The Last Avant-Garde by David Lehman)

Fall Bouquet {and a button}

Fall Bouquet {and a button}. November 26, 2011.

 

Think in images, not sentences anymore

or better, fill yourself with food-sounds

against hollow silences.

Colours are a kind of music

and music pours a red-yellow wine here.

Drink it.

 

Sit like a cat in the Sun,

this warm December Sun that heals

this warm December Sun that lights

all dusty corners of the soul

and renews.

My California, My South,

My brilliant blessing, I thank you.

 

Year, rush to an end.

Is it Spring when the birdlets leave the gilded cage?

Open all doors.

Is it Spring when the starlings return from Southern latitudes?

Then burst open shutters and windows

They never do close here.

 

In the photograph, the hand is like a wing that shelters

It is always there,

in the heart-home

that has no doors

like a nest.

Thinking Deconstructivism in a Canyon

San Diego, November 25, 2011. Third Avenue Pedestrian Bridge.

San Diego, November 25, 2011. Third Avenue bridge and context (canyon).

Bridge, De-constructed.

” In recent years , the modern understanding of social responsibility as functional program has been superseded by a concern for context. But contextualism has been used as an excuse for mediocrity, for a dumb servility within the familiar. Since deconstructivist architecture seeks the unfamiliar within the familiar, it displaces the context rather than acquiesce to it. What makes it disturbing is the way deconstructivist architecture finds the unfamiliar already hidden within the familiar context. By its intervention, elements of the context become defamiliarized. In one project, towers are turned over on their sides, while in others, bridges are tilted up to become towers.”

Mark Wigley

Fall Bouquet

Cafe' De Flore, Paris, October 2011.

Cafe' De Flore, Paris, October 2011.

Fall Bouquet


“El cariño que te tengo. Yo no lo puedo negar.“

Paris sun

is the glow of her cafes.

It is a dusk sun that burns in the night,

the warmth of crowds,

bright minds while shadows fall.

Cigarette ambers,

the heat of Bossanova bass

in St. Germain.


“Llego a Cueto, voy para Mayarí”

Fallen leaves of orange, gold, copper

I make a bouquet

for our house of glass love.

Sunset is each day’s autumn.

I fill rooms with colours

Gardener of my own heart.

Draw before you lose them

Orange umbrellas

I’m left with buttons.

“¡Y ahora si quieren bailar,
búsquense otro timbalero!”

 

You opened my heart

with a wound of light.

 

There are flamenco guitars and sheeshas

on roof terraces

There are nights such as these

–filled with stars–

in Tunis or Bayreuth.

 

There are dancing sunrises in Ibiza

and white cabanas on Miami beaches.

 

There is a cafe where our traveling souls will meet

There is poetry after the fire.

To Choose a Pair of Gloves

To choose a pair of gloves
Is serious business.

I place your brown leather small
On top of mine
It is as if you are protecting me
A tender shelter for my hands
Made of florentine winters
cobblestones, morning trains, domes.
It runs a bit short
A black cashmere wrap, or
the vulnerable clinging of the young.

The gloves are empty
Your hands are not there
Your gloves are shells
Echoing your touch

Your gloves are naked
They are the skin you use to protect your skin
I carry them now
I carry you

Then I place mine on top
Brown like yours, but bigger
Your gloves poke from under , happy.
Mother and child of the same tan.

A Directive

Taken in Downtown San Diego, East Village. October 2011.

Wire Crochet Design Experiments

Wire Crochet tubular bracelet.  November 20, 2011.

Wire Crochet ring. This is a cocktail ring that can have a rounded or flattened look. November 20, 2011.

Wire Crochet and Ring. November 20, 2011.

I have been busy conjuring up objects from wire.

As architects, jewelry is the smallest realized design we can create. Next of course there are the futuristic 3D printers, but I like the analog character of crochet, using my hands, painting with metal and ending up with wearable art. I have been crocheting since the age of eleven (thank you, Salesian Sisters!) but this is the first time i produced jewelry. I remember at 14 using pliers, crazy glue and metal wire to create very small butterfly earrings. My parents must not have been impressed, because i was not immediately pulled out of my Linguistic Lycaeum and redirected to the Fine Arts and Jewelry institute.

The bracelet, a simple tubular structure, and the ring (my design),  can be made using pure silver , copper, gold or various wire colors. I used No. 2 Crochet Hook and 34 gauge wire.

Cannot wait to experiment further, the Amazon fairy shall visit again soon (she brought me really good books on wire and hook jewelry this time).

Merry Christmas to me and here is to more jewelry and sculpture with a hook!

Wire crochet ring- Rounded position. November 20, 2011.

Wire Crochet Ring - Flattened look. November 20, 2011

Wire Crochet Bracelet and Ring. November 20, 2011.

Murmurations {Seven Hundred Sixty Days)

Murmurations Upon Watching Un Chien Andalou. Digital Collage.November 20, 2011.

The Spoiled

Ink on Paper. November 19, 2011.

Shelter From The Storm

Ink on paper+ digital manipulation. November 18,2011.

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The Spirit and the Scar

The story behind this photo: this was taken at Yoga One studio in San Diego while I was supposed to be in Downward Dog position.

The orange curtains created the most intoxicating reflection on the wooden floor, and the real effect is ten times better that what I captured here.                                                                                                                                                                      The thing is, this effect is only visible when the lights are turned down, and the room is getting into a meditative mood.
I have to be sneaky, because one can’t disrupt a yoga class in the name of Art. Or can she? I have a dilemma.


I will try again next time and post updates, if I get a better frame. I learned about the term ‘Talkitecture’ tonight. Perhaps this was ‘Talking art”. Tart?

The Secret of the Lost Umbrella | Essay on Orange

Ink drawing, Watercolor. 16 November 2011.

Ink drawing, Watercolor + Digital Manipulation. 16 November 2011.

I was recently reunited with luggage lost 45 days ago.

Three items were missing: a bottle of Cinema Eau De Parfum by Yves Saint Laurent, a beloved collaged orange umbrella bought in Barcelona and a pair of Sketchers shoes. Go figure.

Immediately i set out to substitute my lost umbrella. As said in one Law and Order episode (I paraphrase): “Hardheaded Calabrese: the people there are very stubborn… once something is taken away from them, they don’t rest until …they get it back.”

My mind went back to the orange umbrella I bought for my mom in Milano last Christmas (probably with her money;)), from one of my favorite stores: Muji.

In my quest, I ran into this glorious essay on a particular shade of orange.

I have a box of orange objects in my house that I have been meaning to combine into a series.

Tomorrow seems like a good day for it, and orange thoughts are perfect for winter-short days and too much yin.

Before you read, keep this in mind:

Fire in Arabic is ‘Nar’.

………….

My Orange

by Michele Foyer


If we lived during the time of the Dutch West Indies Company, I would tell you that the color that so captured me was the child of paprika and chocolate. The world no longer swoons over spice willing to risk a sail beyond the end of the known. And yes, sadly rape and pillage in its desperate greed. I had only to pass the window of the Muji store in Manhattan’s Chelsea to discover this color in an umbrella.


What is it that grabbed me? Is it a vibration for which the color is only a foil? Or is it something about the color itself lodged between memory and desire? This redder orange infused with luxurious chocolate yielded a strangely jazzier yet muter tone than orange. But if we are mapping out its terrain inevitably the orange relation comes up.


My “Muji Orange” is a distant relative of the neon orange of warning, as well as a “tangerine streamlined baby” of sixties psychedelic abandon. Its crazy older paternal cousin might be the Tang of astronauts or maybe the impossible orange of orange Crush soda, or possibly even Blake’s Tyger burning bright, but its doting grandmother, is definitely — yes, most definitely — a bittersweet French marmalade.


There is some mystery to orange. Orange is the only color in the seven-color spectrum besides violet that originates as a noun, naming a particular thing. It refers to the berry fruit of the orange tree, something very concrete and specific and not as abstract as the other colors. Was the experience of the orange fruit so strong that it came to stand for the orange experience?


The Old English Dictionary (OED) states that in Medieval Latin “the forms ‘arangia’, ‘arantia’ (Du Cange) whence ‘aurantia’ have “popular association with ‘aurum’ gold from the colour.” Perhaps, the OED postulates, there is an etymological relationship between the Old French “orenge” for “arauge” after “or” gold. The OED traces the “loss of the initial ‘n‘ in French, English and Italian” as “ascribed to its absorption into the indefinite article” resulting in “narange” absorbing “une” and “narancia” absorbing ”una.”


Also from the OED we understand that the “native country of orange appears to have been the northern frontier of India, where wild oranges are still found and the name may have originated there.” In Late Sankrit the word for orange is “naranga;” in Hindi it is “narangi” (OED, p. 2001)


Is “orange” related to the color of the fruit and/or to gold and the word “ore” (OED, p. 2001)? Are both these not only things, but also perhaps experiences of light? More questions arise as we consider other correspondences that I call “rhymes and ricochets.”


In Persian the world for pomegranate is “nar” (OED, p.2001) which echoes the nar of narange. Is this coincidence or relationship? The OED states it is not certain. Was the “nar” / pomegranate the fateful fruit of the tree in the Garden of Eden myth? It is possible because the pomegranate rather than the apple was the indigenous fruit. If the pomegranate was the tree of knowledge, what was the knowledge that this golden ball embodied? Might it have reflected a relationship of light to dark?


Is there anything other than coincidence to the resonance of the pomegranate which also figures in the myth of Persephone who spends half her days in a descent into Hades when the earth experiences the dark of winter and the other half above ground when the earth experiences the light of spring – alternations or gradients of light and dark?


In one narrative color is dependent upon history and culture. The OED by definition is a history of the English language, tracing the history and values of the western world with its migrations and roots to the East. Today we think oranges are synonymous with the warm climates of Florida and California. We often believe they are indigenous to North America. However, they were planted by conquistador sailors who needed to create supplies of vitamin C to take with them to guard against scurvy on their long sea journeys.


What is orange in cultures outside of the European? In other cultures closed off to our own for so long by the migration and exchange of trade, say the Japanese or Chinese, what is the etymology of the word orange? In Cantonese Chinese (but not in Mandarin), the word for orange is related by sound to the word for gold. At New Year’s the Mandarin orange embodies good wishes for prosperity. Are “gold” and “orange” a conflation of all these color experiences of light?


What about other earlier societies? I wonder whether orange might “rhyme” with “fire.” Fire had the life-giving power that made a large difference to a culture. If gold wasn’t the commodity of value, it might make sense for the word for this experience to be “fire.” Might gold be in part only an imitation of the light of fire?


These richoceting ruminations about gold and fire are vital, because it is precisely the light of gold or fire that starts to go missing in “my” Muji Orange. It is that chocolate brown in addition to the red of the orange that makes the color “step back” toward the shade. Muji Orange recedes from the saturation and almost clear brilliance of an ordinary orange that lags just behind the brilliance of yellow—whether the origin is the light of sun, gold or fire.


Muji is a Japanese company and that perhaps contributes and infuses a measure of its aesthetic into that of the west. The store’s name is related to “mujo” which evokes “transience” in Japanese. I once heard about Japanese “killed colors.” These colors had a little bit of death in them, fading from their original brilliance and glory. I couldn’t find reference to them again but only to the rikuyu colors made from graying. In Muji Orange the quality of orange steps away from the brilliance of the sunny orange into the shade, holding a note of something that is darker. It is not a sinister dark to be avoided but one to be savored like a fine chocolate.


Is my “Muji Orange” so beautiful to me because it captures the life of light and its brilliance — and the life of dark and its recession? To me “Muji Orange” is a kumquat color par excellence. First like the sweet rind of the kumquat there is a “taste” of brilliance and then immediately, almost simultaneously, just as the fruit yields a sour taste, my Muji orange bursts with another very different moody, darker earthy “taste.” Does Muji Orange with its paprika jazzy zest want to dance the tarantula? Is it death or lack of light that gives my Muji color its kick?
I have questioned whether it was the vibration of the color that pulled me into the Chelsea store — the umbrella an extraneous element. But I wonder if the precise color of orange might also be a “rhyme” with the function of “umbrella”? Are the form and the vibration related in the poetry of memory?


Recently I recalled an earlier encounter with umbrellas. When I studied in Madrid in my 20s, I would often take the subway to go downtown to the Turner bookshop. I’d climb the stairs of the appropriately named Sol subway stop that spilled out onto Jose Antonio, emerging more often than not into a scorching sun.


On my way to the bookshop I would pass outside the window of a store that made confectionaries of violets sold in white and purple miniature hatboxes. But my favorite was the neighboring shop entirely devoted to umbrellas with a placard handwritten in a swirly old-fashioned cursive script in the window that read “Manana llovera.” Both its whimsy and its sales-minded craft were not lost in the English translation — “tomorrow it will rain.”


Last December, many years after my sunny Spanish sojourn, when to me it is now irrefutable that night and day, death and life are folded into one another and that Persephone must braid both dark and light — the Muji Orange color caught my eye. Manana llovera. Tomorrow it will rain. Dear Reader, I bought the umbrella.


Bibliographic Note The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Volume I, AO, (Oxford University Press, United States, 1982).

Copyright Michele Foyer. Web: http://michelefoyer.com/news.html

Keys

Paris, 2011.

Meditations on the Sun and Moon

Meditations on the Sun and Moon

Hurricane after silence,
The Sun gives liberally –
You cannot trap its warmth:
Love cannot exist in a prison
It is true
But the Sun will always have her one Moon.

Fences in the water are useless
the water will continue to flow-
You can take a horse to it.

You cannot start fires and complain
If you get burned
You cannot sow seeds on puddles, asphalt,
Dirt
And marvel when a plant doth sprout.

A plane cuts the sky
Writes a requiem
Draws parallel light-hopes.

I live for that tender moment at the end of my days
As the sun is in full crescendo glory,
giving the last, sweet ripeness
Her moon rushes to a corner
Small, full of mischief
and twinkling laughter.

San Francisco, November 2011

Read The City

Paris, October 2011.