“Not activity. Not reason. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what one needs to know. ”
Author janeafrancis
New Paintings
Quote: Aron Ralston
“I chose this – this rock has been waiting for me my entire life – the rock from a million billion years ago.
Every action has been leading me to this crack in the earth’s surface.”
From the film ‘127 Hours’
Quote: Mairi McFadyen
“Theoretical explanations quickly become removed from lived reality and from the infinitely rich encounters that cause us to want to think more deeply about our experience in the first place. In geopoetics, I found a way to reconcile – or perhaps reconnect, in a way that made sense to me – the rigour of cerebral, analytic work with the experience of being a body in the world. For me, this is what geopoetics was first about: seeking awareness and understanding both intellectually, by developing knowledge, and sensitively, bodily, intuitively using all our senses to become ‘attuned to the world.’ I visualise geopoetics as the rigorous pursuit of clarity of thought, chasing those flashes of insight, creativity and connection, but always grounded in my embodied, aesthetic experience of being-in-the-world.”
from ‘Finding Radical Hope in Geopoetics’ published in Bella Caledonia
Quote: Chinua Achebe
“Those who tell you “Do not put too much politics in your art” are not being honest. If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is… What they are saying is don’t upset the system.”
Quote: Jorge Luis Borges
“We accept reality easily, perhaps because we intuit that nothing is real.” from Labyrinths, The Immortal
what I want to do
I don’t want to flatter people, I want to excite them. I want to challenge them a little, or a lot if they can take it. Perhaps i’ll practice the art of challenging people just as much as they can take, so that they dig deeper each time. I think being flattered is a theme of our times, and that it is poisonous to people’s ability to think for themselves, think more holistically or think of themselves as part of communities.
painting and perfuming
I find lots of similarities between composing a perfume and painting. Creating accords is analogous with mixing raw colours to make the perfect colour to convey what you are imagining or what from life you want to recreate. Paints, like perfume materials have different textures, opacities, weights.. Putting them together in a painting is about balancing instinct and control, with each colour/texture suggesting or demanding what needs to be done around it, what needs to happen next…And its all about your responses and memories and dreams… Yes, I would go so far as to say that perfume is the main medium I am working in at the moment.
Here in Scotland there is an embryonic interest in perfuming by independents, or smaller brands. There are a couple of people making perfume here I believe, and some critics and bloggers, but its yet to really take off. This interests me too, the combination of being a country in political flux and struggling to express itself culturally and the potential for something like perfumery. I’m fascinated by the idea of expressing the nature around me that I love, the feelings it evokes, and landscapes, and also the emotive and philosophical responses to that land and natural world.
The space we enter or exit
Beginnings of a new painting….
Quote: Giacomo Leopardi
“We say that someone of serious intelligence and determination is bound to achieve great things in the world, that surely he won’t remain obscure, whatever his circumstances. But the habit of prudence in matters requiring careful thought inevitably precludes quick, deft resolution; prudence retards progress and delays execution. Because of this, men of great, hard-working genius are often, almost always really, prisoners of their own irresoluteness – they are indecisive, shy, tentative, uncertain, fragile, inept at following through. Quite unlike those who rule the world, where decisiveness, not prudence, gets more done more quickly – that’s why the world is always left at the mercy of mediocrities.”
from Zibaldone di penssieri
JANE FRANCIS 