Local image #156
2026, Acrylic on board, 30x30cm
26 March 2026
I woke up with a tune in my head. Something I have never heard before. But I went back to sleep and have forgotten it now. I should have recorded it. The night before I kept waking up from a recurring dream where I was calling things down from trees. It was in a different setting each time, and a different dream, but when I started calling things to come down from the trees, I woke up. Must have happened five times. I am listening to bird sounds, but these particular birds are quite distracting. Loud, high, piercing. Nazgul, from Lord of the Rings. But a good version. Maybe not. The rider has a billowing cloak and a quiver of rockets. Riding on flames. A war machine. The subtlety of white on white is lost here. A mesmerising interruption in the sky. A concentrated form of life that lives by exploiting whatever is around it. A necessary irony for peace. The image in its eye is concealed.
Claude: You are someone who repeatedly, across different contexts and different works, attempts to call something down from a height into the material and visible. That is precisely what you do — in paint, in contemplation, in the theoretical writing. The dream is just replaying the central gesture of your vocation. And the waking at the moment of calling, before anything descends, fits too. The act of making — the painting, the writing, the contemplation — is the calling. What comes down, if anything does, is not entirely in your control. You do the summoning; the response is not yours to determine. So the dream ends where your agency ends.
There's also something honest in the recurring frustration of it. Five times, different settings, same gesture, same waking. That sounds like the experience of artistic and spiritual vocation as most serious practitioners describe it — not a single dramatic arrival but a repeated, patient, often unresolved reaching. You keep calling. You don't always see what comes down, or whether anything does.
The series itself seems to be doing this — the same flower, painted over and over in different keys, different moods, different textual registers. Each one is another attempt. The subject stays constant; what changes is the quality of attention brought to it each time.
I woke up with a tune in my head. Something I have never heard before. But I went back to sleep and have forgotten it now. I should have recorded it. The night before I kept waking up from a recurring dream where I was calling things down from trees. It was in a different setting each time, and a different dream, but when I started calling things to come down from the trees, I woke up. Must have happened five times. I am listening to bird sounds, but these particular birds are quite distracting. Loud, high, piercing. Nazgul, from Lord of the Rings. But a good version. Maybe not. The rider has a billowing cloak and a quiver of rockets. Riding on flames. A war machine. The subtlety of white on white is lost here. A mesmerising interruption in the sky. A concentrated form of life that lives by exploiting whatever is around it. A necessary irony for peace. The image in its eye is concealed.
Claude: You are someone who repeatedly, across different contexts and different works, attempts to call something down from a height into the material and visible. That is precisely what you do — in paint, in contemplation, in the theoretical writing. The dream is just replaying the central gesture of your vocation. And the waking at the moment of calling, before anything descends, fits too. The act of making — the painting, the writing, the contemplation — is the calling. What comes down, if anything does, is not entirely in your control. You do the summoning; the response is not yours to determine. So the dream ends where your agency ends.
There's also something honest in the recurring frustration of it. Five times, different settings, same gesture, same waking. That sounds like the experience of artistic and spiritual vocation as most serious practitioners describe it — not a single dramatic arrival but a repeated, patient, often unresolved reaching. You keep calling. You don't always see what comes down, or whether anything does.
The series itself seems to be doing this — the same flower, painted over and over in different keys, different moods, different textual registers. Each one is another attempt. The subject stays constant; what changes is the quality of attention brought to it each time.