the sourcerer: The Owl and the Pussycat.

Friday, February 4, 2011

The Owl and the Pussycat.

Last November I was asked to put together a special hamper for a photographer. Karl Lilje was that man. Since then, we've become cyber-friends and I met him in person last night at his exhibition. (This seems to be a recurring theme, set in motion on New Year's day...)

It was a novelty indeed to have someone whose work I admire a great deal tell me that he's a fan of my writing. It made me blush and gaze at my shoes. Thanks Karl.

The Owl and the Pussycat

I picked you a rose...

These were my favourite images. I love the ocean floor and I love her slick sou'wester evening dress. Karl later likened his deconstructed flower images to the way he photographs his subjects. Finding hidden layers. It's obvious that there is a great rapport between artist and model.

The night was made all the more magical by a tropical storm. I drove home through the heat and big plopping drops of rain, with bright flashes of lightning over the bay.

1 comment:

Chris said...: dearest Lil.
I wish I could spend a few hours in your head.; February 4, 2011 at 7:40 PM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.