Painters Sun Quotes

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

You too know that all my eyes see, all I touch with myself, from any distance, is Diego. The caress of fabrics, the color of colors, the wires, the nerves, the pencils, the leaves, the dust, the cells, the war and the sun, everything experienced in the minutes of the non-clocks and the non-calendars and the empty non-glances, is him.

Long Time. The famous seventeenth-century Ming painter Chou Yung relates a story that altered his behavior forever. Late one winter afternoon he set out to visit a town that lay across the river from his own town. He was bringing some important books and papers with him and had commissioned a young boy to help him carry them. As the ferry neared the other side of the river, Chou Yung asked the boatman if they would have time to get to the town before its gates closed, since it was a mile away and night was approaching. The boatman glanced at the boy, and at the bundle of loosely tied papers and books—“Yes,” he replied, “if you do not walk too fast.” As they started out, however, the sun was setting. Afraid of being locked out of the town at night, prey to local bandits, Chou and the boy walked faster and faster, finally breaking into a run. Suddenly the string around the papers broke and the documents scattered on the ground. It took them many minutes to put the packet together again, and by the time they had reached the city gates, it was too late. When you force the pace out of fear and impatience, you create a nest of problems that require fixing, and you end up taking much longer than if you had taken your time.

Epilogue Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme-- why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter's vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralyzed by fact. All's misalliance. Yet why not say what happened? Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.

Some few people are born without any sense of time. As consequence, their sense of place becomes heightened to excruciating degree. They lie in tall green grass are questioned by poets and painters from all over the world. These time-deaf are beseeched to describe the precise placement of trees in the spring, the shape of snow on the Alps, the angle of sun on a church, the position of rivers, the location of moss, the pattern of birds in a flock. Yet the time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.

Even after a lifetime of being near oracles, I found their predictions annoyingly vague.

Kicking an art addiction is a heck of a lot harder than going sober.

I've seen you up close, like this. I remember your eyes. They're the color of the sea -- just inside a coral reef and your freckles are like the stones of a volcanic island scattered along the sand. Your hair is like the sun setting over the water, shooting out orange rays in all directions

Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern painters had found there. He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

The sign painter had guts, maybe. Good taste, no. Anyone with a taste for chocolate Paydays had been spending too much time in the sun. We've stumbled on another find, I believe, Sergeant. Inspector, I stand amazed- your deductive acumen is exceeded only by your good looks and the extraordinary length of your reproductive organ.

Some painters turn a yellow dot into the sun, others turn the sun into a yellow dot.

Personally, I thought it chancy to rely on only one god. It struck me as akin to placing all your drachars on one chariot at the races...It didn't seem logical that one god could ensure the proper working of the world.

In my yellow room, Sunflowers with purple eyes stands out on a yellow background. They bath their stems in a yellow pot, on a yellow table. In a corner of the painting, the signature of the painter: Vincent. And the yellow sun that passes through the yellow curtains of my room floods all this fluorescence with gold. And in the morning upon awakening, from my bed, I imagin that all this smells very good. Oh yes! He loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from holland. Those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul That abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth. When two of us were together in arles, both of us mad and at constant war over the beauty of color, me, i loved the color red, Where to find a perfect vermilion? He traced with his most yellow brush on the wall, Suddenly turned violet. Je suis saint esprit Je suis sain d'espri. Paul gauguin, 1894.

Some few people are born without any sense of time.As consequence, their sense of place becomes heightened to an excruciating degree. They lie in tall grass and are questioned by poets and painters from all over the world. These time-deaf are beseeched to describe the precise placement of trees in the spring, the shape of snow on the Alps, the angle of sun on a church, the position of rivers, the location of moss, the pattern of birds in a flock. Yet the time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.

As they clean the walls with wet cloths and sponges, they uncover the earlier paints, most prevalent a stark blue that must have been inspired by Mary's blue robes. Renaissance painters could get that rare color only from ground lapis lazuli brought from quarries in what is now Afghanistan.

The painter copies this bed from one point of view. He is thus at three removes from reality. He does not understand the bed, he does not measure it, he could not make it.

The painter and the writer are not just copyists or even illusionists, but through some deeper vision of their subject-matter may become privileged truth tellers.

Focus blurs, Gibson used to say. Focus blinds. You must take in all of a thing by seeing the totality of it, not by focusing on minutiae. This is as important for a ruler as it is for a painter.

A fire burns in the evening sky Breaking like an egg in a pan A sea of yellowish orange spreads In accordance with divine plan.  Vibrant paint drips to the edge Of ashen clouds drifting past The sun is a messy painter Every brush stroke massive and vast. The clouds are like matches Starting as fiery flame Then fading to ashes  A burning passion, tamed.  The red, orange, yellow leaves On the ground in this season Reflect the colors of the sky, and The sunlight that used to feed them.  A September sunset beaming  Down as a sailor's last call A herald for the coming winter A message, enjoy the fleeting fall. 

Nadia now lies back as her body perks up at me like the white lotus that reaches for the sun’s love. I now come into Nadia with all of my love, my lips running over her silk skin like water drifting downstream. Her kisses are filled with an incredible ability to give as her body merges into mine. The sounds of relief escaping her lips commend my escape, transcending me into the absolute pureness of love’s unseen realm.

In your travels, do not draw your attention to those stones in the dirt that cause your feet to ache. But rather draw your attention to the loveliness of all that does surround you. Marvel at the blades of grass that seem to turn silk under the loom of golden leaves that share with you the sun’s warmth and ponder the impression of that morning fog whose kiss good morning gently asks Mother Nature to arise so that her spirit can bask in the beauty of her own imagination as she gazes into the distance, not in fear, but in awe of that beauty which will cause the imagination to create all endless possibilities that the spirit knows to already exist. Remember that your spirit is not a device that heeds to walls and streets that tell you where to go. Your spirit is your attention drawn to that beauty in the distance that only you can look to. Your spirit is connected to your environment by the imagination and the travel that you possess. Walk with your spirit in front of you and you will become part of that beauty in the distance that causes you to marvel with gladness. You will always be beautiful because this is who you are.

Martha’s Vineyard had fossil deposits one million centuries old. The northern reach of Cape Cod, however, on which my house sat, the land I inhabited—that long curving spit of shrub and dune that curves in upon itself in a spiral at the tip of the Cape—had only been formed by wind and sea over the last ten thousand years. That cannot amount to more than a night of geological time. Perhaps this is why Provincetown is so beautiful. Conceived at night (for one would swear it was created in the course of one dark storm) its sand flats still glistened in the dawn with the moist primeval innocence of land exposing itself to the sun for the first time. Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit. One remembered then that the land was only ten thousand years old, and one’s ghosts had no roots. We did not have old Martha’s Vineyard’s fossil remains to subdue each spirit, no, there was nothing to domicile our specters who careened with the wind down the two long streets of our town which curved together around the bay like two spinsters on their promenade to church.   NORMAN MAILER, from Tough Guys Don’t Dance

I understand what binds the sculptor to his clay, the painter to his colors, each workman to the matter he handles, and the docility and acquiescence of the matter to the movements of the one who animates it; I know the love that passes from the fingers into the folds, the holes, the swellings. Shall I abandon him? Lucien would prevent me from living. Unless his quiet tenderness, his blushing modesty, became beneath my sun of love a tiger or a lion. If he loves me, will he follow me? What will become of him without me?

Why are your cheeks red?" He was looking at me like I was a silly child, and I kind of wanted to hurt him. "Because I'm sitting in the hot sun, dumbass." "No need for name-calling when I'm trying to help you." "How are you trying to help me, exactly?" "If you're interested in Charlie, I can provide the assist." "No offense, but I will never-in my entire life-want you anywhere near my love life." "Never say never." "Nevernevernevernever and oh, yeah-never." "You wound me, Buxbaum," he said, putting his hand over his heart.

why do you paint in the dark' i ask him and he looks not at me but away 'because i cannot bear my own darkness in the light' he is quiet for some time 'but inwardly i am told where there is paint to be and i paint it there in the dark so none can see myself truly burning in the sun

The sun set and the moon rose parchment yellow, the marks on its surface like traces of lead someone had tried to rub away. Li Du walked alone on the path to the mountain. A painter could have captured it well: a defeated curve of shoulders at odds with a determined stride against a mountain that filled the sky.” - p 83

When Nature made her chief work, Stella’s eyes, In colour black why wrapp’d she beams so bright? Would she in beamy black, like painter wise, Frame daintiest lustre, mix’d of shades and light? Or did she else that sober hue devise, In object best to knit and strength our sight, Lest if no veil those brave gleams did disguise, They sun-like should more dazzle than delight? Or would she her miraculous power show, That whereas black seems Beauty’s contrary, She even in black doth make all beauties flow? Both so and thus, she minding Love should be Placed ever there, gave him this mourning weed, To honour all their deaths, who for her bleed.

a painter once had said that her skin had in it all the colours of the setting sun, of the setting sun at its borders, where the splendour mingles with the sky; it had a hundred mellow tints - cream and ivory, the palest yellow of the heart of roses and the faintest, the very faintest green, all flushed with radiant light.

When he came here two years ago I had not expected that we would become so much attached to each other, for now that I am alone in the apartment there is a decided emptiness about me. If I can find someone I will take him in, but it is not easy to replace someone like Vincent. It is unbelievable how much he knows and what a sane view he has of the world. If he still has some years to live I am certain that he will make a name for himself. Through him I got to know many painters who regarded him very highly. He is one of the avant-garde for new ideas, that is to say, there is nothing new under the sun and so it would be better to say: for the regeneration of the old ideas which through routine have been diluted and worn out. In addition he has such a big heart that he always tries to do something for others. It’s a pity for those who cannot understand him or refuse to do so.

Every relation between forms in a painting is to some degree adaptable to the painter's purpose. This is not the case with photography. Composition in the profound, formative sense of the word cannot enter into photography. The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time. One might argue that photography is as close to music as to painting. I have said that a photograph bears witness to a human choice being exercised. The choice is not between photographing X and Y: but between photographing at X moment or at Y moment. The objects recorded in any photograph (from the most effective to the most commonplace) carry approximately the same weight, the same conviction. What varies is the intensity with which we are made aware of the poles of absence and presence. A photograph, while recording what has been seen, always and by its nature refers to what is not seen. It isolates, preserves, and presents a moment taken from a continuum. The only decision (the still photographer) can take is as regards the moment he chooses to isolate. Yet this apparent limitation gives the photograph its unique power. The immediate relation between what is present and what is absent is particular to each photograph: it may be that of ice to sun, of grief to tragedy, of a smile to a pleasure, of a body to love, of a winning race-horse to the race it has run.

STAINS With red clay between my toes, and the sun setting over my head, the ghost of my mother blows in, riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord, riding on a honeysuckle breeze. Her teeth, the keys of a piano. I play her grinning ivory notes with cadenced fumbling fingers, splattered with paint, textured with scars. A song rises up from the belly of my past and rocks me in the bosom of buried memories. My mama’s dress bears the stains of her life: blueberries, blood, bleach, and breast milk; She cradles in her arms a lifetime of love and sorrow; Its brilliance nearly blinds me. My fingers tire, as though I've played this song for years. The tune swells red, dying around the edges of a setting sun. A magnolia breeze blows in strong, a heavenly taxi sent to carry my mother home. She will not say goodbye. For there is no truth in spoken farewells. I am pregnant with a poem, my life lost in its stanzas. My mama steps out of her dress and drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet. She stands alone: bathed, blooming, burdened with nothing of this world. Her body is naked and beautiful, her wings gray and scorched, her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine. I watch her departure, her flapping wings: She doesn’t look back, not even once, not even to whisper my name: Brenda. I lick the teeth of my piano mouth. With a painter’s hands, with a writer’s hands with rusty wrinkled hands, with hands soaked in the joys, the sorrows, the spills of my mother’s life, I pick up eighty-one years of stains And pull her dress over my head. Her stains look good on me.

The concierge, before she became a concierge, had owned a drink-selling concession at the Paris race-courses. Her life-work lay in the pelouse, but she kept an eye on the people of the pesage, and she took great pride in telling me which of my guests were well brought up, which were of good family, who were sportsmen, a French word pronounced with the accent on the men. The only trouble was that people who did not fall into any of those three cat-egories were very liable to be told there was no one home, chez Barnes. One of my friends, an extremely underfed-looking painter, who was obviously to Madame Duzinell neither well brought up, of good family, nor a sportsman, wrote me a letter asking if I could get him a pass to get by the concierge so he could come up and see me occasionally in the evenings.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing. In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. The deep-laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. The figure is advisedly chosen, for if the canneries dipped their mouths into the bay the canned sardines which emerge from the other end would be metaphorically, at least, even more horrifying. Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. Then shining cars bring the upper classes down: superintendents, accountants, owners who disappear into offices. Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in trousers and rubber coats and oilcloth aprons. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women, straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again-quiet and magical. Its normal life returns. The bums who retired in disgust under the black cypress-tree come out to sit on the rusty pipes in the vacant lot. The girls from Dora's emerge for a bit of sun if there is any. Doc strolls from the Western Biological Laboratory and crosses the street to Lee Chong's grocery for two quarts of beer. Henri the painter noses like an Airedale through the junk in the grass-grown lot for some pan or piece of wood or metal he needs for the boat he is building. Then the darkness edges in and the street light comes on in front of Dora's-- the lamp which makes perpetual moonlight in Cannery Row. Callers arrive at Western Biological to see Doc, and he crosses the street to Lee Chong's for five quarts of beer. How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise-- the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream-- be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will on to a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-- to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.

June Afternoon" Didn't I tell you everything is possible in this deja vu? Try the river boat, the carousel, feed the pigeons, Bar-B-Q. Look at all the people, happy faces all around. Smiling, throwing kisses, busy making lazy sounds It's a bright June afternoon, it never gets dark. Wah-wah! Here comes the sun. Get your green, green tambourine, let's play in the park. Wah-wah! Here comes the sun Some folks are on blankets, slowly daydreaming and reaching for their food. Let's go buy an ice-cream and a magazine with an attitude and put on a cassette, we can pretend that you're a star cos life's so very simple just like la-la-la It's a bright June afternoon... There's a painter painting his masterpiece. There are some squirrels jumping in the trees, There's a wide-eyed boy with a red balloon. All my life I've longed for this afternoon.

Let us suppose that this ounce of mud is left in perfect rest, and that its elements gather together, like to like, so that their atoms may get into the closest relations possible. Let the clay begin. Ridding itself of all foreign substance, it gradually becomes a white earth, already very beautiful; and fit, with help of congealing fire, to be made into finest porcelain, and painted on, and be kept in kings’ palaces. But such artificial consistence is not its best. Leave it still quiet to follow its own instinct of unity, and it becomes not only white, but clear; not only clear, but hard; not only clear and hard, but so set that it can deal with light in a wonderful way, and gather out of it the loveliest blue rays only, refusing the rest. We call it then a sapphire. Such being the consummation of the clay, we give similar permission of quiet to the sand. It also becomes, first, a white earth, then proceeds to grow clear and hard, and at last arranges itself in mysterious, infinitely fine, parallel lines, which have the power of reflecting not merely the blue rays, but the blue, green, purple, and red rays in the greatest beauty in which they can be seen through any hard material whatsoever. We call it then an opal. In next order the soot sets to work; it cannot make itself white at first, but instead of being discouraged, tries harder and harder, and comes out clear at last, and the hardest thing in the world; and for the blackness that it had, obtains in exchange the power of reflecting all the rays of the sun at once in the vividest blaze that any solid thing can shoot. We call it then a diamond. Last of all the water purifies or unites itself, contented enough if it only reach the form of a dew-drop; but if we insist on its proceeding to a more perfect consistence, it crystallizes into the shape of a star. And for the ounce of slime which we had by political economy of competition, we have by political economy of co-operation, a sapphire, an opal, and a diamond, set in the midst of a star of snow.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art. The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all,—that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms,—the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno." Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.

You know,” I said, “you don’t owe New Fiddleham anything. You don’t need to help them.” “Look,” Charlie said as we clipped past Market Street. He was pointing at a man delicately painting enormous letters onto a broad window as we passed. NONNA SANTORO’S, it read, although the RO’S was still just an outline. “That Italian restaurant?” “Yes,” he smiled. “They will be opening their doors for the first time very soon. Sweet family. I bought my first meal in New Fiddleham from that man. A couple of meatballs from a street cart were about all I could afford at the time. He’s an immigrant, too. He’s going to do well. His red sauce is amazing.” “That’s grand for him, then,” I said. “I like it when doors open,” said Charlie. “Doors are opening in New Fiddleham every day. It is a remarkable time to be alive anywhere, really. Do you think our parents could ever have imagined having machines that could wash dishes, machines that could sew, machines that do laundry? Pretty soon we’ll be taking this trolley ride without any horses. I’ve heard that Glanville has electric streetcars already. Who knows what will be possible fifty years from now, or a hundred. Change isn’t always so bad.” “Your optimism is both baffling and inspiring,” I said. “The sun is rising,” he replied with a little chuckle. I glanced at the sky. It was well past noon. “It’s just something my sister and I used to say,” he clarified. “I think you would like Alina. You often remind me of her. She has a way of refusing to let the world keep her down.” He smiled and his gaze drifted away, following the memory. “Alina found a rolled-up canvas once,” he said, “a year or so after our mother passed away. It was an oil painting—a picture of the sun hanging low over a rippling ocean. She was a beautiful painter, our mother. I could tell that it was one of hers, but I had never seen it before. It felt like a message, like she had sent it, just for us to find. “I said that it was a beautiful sunset, and Alina said no, it was a sunrise. We argued about it, actually. I told her that the sun in the picture was setting because it was obviously a view from our camp near Gelendzhik, overlooking the Black Sea. That would mean the painting was looking to the west. “Alina said that it didn’t matter. Even if the sun is setting on Gelendzhik, that only means that it is rising in Bucharest. Or Vienna. Or Paris. The sun is always rising somewhere. From then on, whenever I felt low, whenever I lost hope and the world felt darkest, Alina would remind me: the sun is rising.” “I think I like Alina already. It’s a heartening philosophy. I only worry that it’s wasted on this city.” “A city is just people,” Charlie said. “A hundred years from now, even if the roads and buildings are still here, this will still be a whole new city. New Fiddleham is dying, every day, but it is also being constantly reborn. Every day, there is new hope. Every day, the sun rises. Every day, there are doors opening.” I leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “When we’re through saving the world,” I said, “you can take me out to Nonna Santoro’s. I have it on good authority that the red sauce is amazing.” He blushed pink and a bashful smile spread over his face. “When we’re through saving the world, Miss Rook, I will hold you to that.

Kircher’s system shows certain affinities with our series of quaternios. Thus the Second Monad is a duality consisting of opposites, corresponding to the angelic world that was split by Lucifer’s fall. Another significant analogy is that Kircher conceives his schema as a cycle set in motion by God as the prime cause, and unfolding out of itself, but brought back to God again through the activity of human understanding, so that the end returns once more to the beginning. This, too, is an analogy of our formula. The alchemists were fond of picturing their opus as a circulatory process, as a circular distillation or as the uroboros, the snake biting its own tail, and they made innumerable pictures of this process. Just as the central idea of the lapis Philosophorum plainly signifies the self, so the opus with its countless symbols illustrates the process of individuation, the step-by-step development of the self from an unconscious state to a conscious one. That is why the lapis, as prima materia, stands at the beginning of the process as well as at the end.113 According to Michael Maier, the gold, another synonym for the self, comes from the opus circulatorium of the sun. This circle is “the line that runs back upon itself (like the serpent that with its head bites its own tail), wherein that eternal painter and potter, God, may be discerned.”114 In this circle, Nature “has related the four qualities to one another and drawn, as it were, an equilateral square, since contraries are bound together by contraries, and enemies by enemies, with the same everlasting bonds.” Maier compares this squaring of the circle to the “homo quadratus,” the four-square man, who “remains himself” come weal come woe.115 He calls it the “golden house, the twicebisected circle, the four-cornered phalanx, the rampart, the city wall, the four-sided line of battle.”116 This circle is a magic circle consisting of the union of opposites, “immune to all injury.

Although Jung’s distaste for modern art would preclude it, he would have been relieved to know that his wasn’t the only sensitive consciousness at the time plagued with visions of destruction. In 1912 the German Expressionist painter Ludwig Meidner produced a series of “Apocalyptic Landscapes.” Meidner depicted cities laid to waste: comets rocket through the sky, the sun blackens, men run screaming through the streets, buildings collapse. Meidner painted his landscapes in a manic rush of inspiration, and his later work lacks this intensity: one is tempted to say that rather than Meidner having a flash of genius, some flash of genius briefly had him, the same one, perhaps, that invaded Jung’s own mind. Had Jung known of Meidner’s work, he would have surely seen it as confirmation of his belief that some individuals are mediums through whom future events are foreshadowed.

2. "HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? or the Will to Truth out of the will to deception? or the generous deed out of selfishness? or the pure sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness? Such genesis is impossible; whoever dreams of it is a fool, nay, worse than a fool; things of the highest value must have a different origin, an origin of THEIR own—in this transitory, seductive, illusory, paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity, they cannot have their source. But rather in the lap of Being, in the intransitory, in the concealed God, in the 'Thing-in-itself— THERE must be their source, and nowhere else!"—This mode of reasoning discloses the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians of all times can be recognized, this mode of valuation is at the back of all their logical procedure; through this "belief" of theirs, they exert themselves for their "knowledge," for something that is in the end solemnly christened "the Truth." The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is THE BELIEF IN ANTITHESES OF VALUES. It never occurred even to the wariest of them to doubt here on the very threshold (where doubt, however, was most necessary); though they had made a solemn vow, "DE OMNIBUS DUBITANDUM." For it may be doubted, firstly, whether antitheses exist at all; and secondly, whether the popular valuations and antitheses of value upon which metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps merely superficial estimates, merely provisional perspectives, besides being probably made from some corner, perhaps from below—"frog perspectives," as it were, to borrow an expression current among painters. In spite of all the value which may belong to the true, the positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things—perhaps even in being essentially identical with them. Perhaps! But who wishes to concern himself with such dangerous "Perhapses"! For that investigation one must await the advent of a new order of philosophers, such as will have other tastes and inclinations, the reverse of those hitherto prevalent—philosophers of the dangerous "Perhaps" in every sense of the term. And to speak in all seriousness, I see such new philosophers beginning to appear.

This is how I healed. Or didn't. One evening I took her down to the river. We turned off the highway and rattled slowly up the gravel road and into the heart of the canyon. The walls closed in above us, the high blue of the sky deeper, deep and dark like a river is deep. The highest rock at the rim was a strip of fire, holding the last long sun. The old gorge was a vessel and it was filling with shadow, slowly and with wind.

But we artists are not about money. Not real artists. A painter may pursue money, but not an artist. We must tell a story, and not all stories are nice. Do you see? Life is not always nice. Art is more than beauty. It is also truth. Not all truth is nice. Your brush, your lines, your colour must expose the truth. Not from here,’ he said with a soft tap on Jack’s head. ‘But from here.’ And his hand moved to Jack’s chest.

into a painter’s palette. ‘He says it’s time I became a novillero.

In the early twentieth century, the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico foresaw a narrowing horizon for activities as “unproductive” as observation. He wrote: In the face of the increasingly materialist and pragmatic orientation of our age…it would not be eccentric in the future to contemplate a society in which those who live for the pleasures of the mind will no longer have the right to demand their place in the sun. The writer, the thinker, the dreamer, the poet, the metaphysician, the observer…he who tries to solve a riddle or to pass judgement will become an anachronistic figure, destined to disappear from the face of the earth like the ichthyosaur and the mammoth.

The Delhi Sultans and the Mughals may have arrived from abroad, and their progenitors might initially have harked back to distant cities in the Ferghana Valley as their idea of ‘home’, but they settled in India and retained no extraterritorial allegiance. They married women from India and diluted their foreign blood to the point that in a few generations no trace remained of their foreign ethnicity. Akbar’s son Jehangir was half-Rajput; Jehangir’s son Shah Jehan also came from an Indian bride; Aurangzeb was only one-eighth non-Indian. Of course, the Mughal emperors were all deeply aware of their connections to Ferghana; they would ask emissaries from there about the conditions of their ancestors’ Chingisid tombs and donate money for their upkeep. The past was part of the Mughal identity, but their conceptions of themselves in the present and for the future became more rooted and embedded in India. The British, in contrast, maintained racial exclusivity, practised discrimination against Indians and sneered at miscegenation. Yes, the Mughal emperors taxed the citizens of India, they claimed tributes from subordinate princes, they plundered the treasuries of those they defeated in battle—all like the British—but they spent or saved what they had earned in India, instead of ‘repatriating’ it to Samarkand or Bukhara as the British did by sending their Indian revenues to London. They ploughed the resources of India into the development of India, establishing and patronizing its industries and handicrafts; they brought painters, sculptors and architects from foreign lands, but they absorbed them at their courts and encouraged them to adorn the artistic and cultural heritage of their new land. The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushioned by generous pensions provided by Indian taxpayers.

In the early twentieth century, the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico foresaw a narrowing horizon for activities as “unproductive” as observation. He wrote: In the face of the increasingly materialist and pragmatic orientation of our age…it would not be eccentric in the future to contemplate a society in which those who live for the pleasures of the mind will no longer have the right to demand their place in the sun. The writer, the thinker, the dreamer, the poet, the metaphysician, the observer…he who tries to solve a riddle or to pass judgement will become an anachronistic figure, destined to disappear from the face of the earth like the ichthyosaur and the mammoth.4

We must take literally what vision teaches us: namely, that through it we come in contact with the sun and the stars, that we are everywhere all at once, and that even our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere—"I am in Petersburg in my bed, in Paris, my eyes see the sun"—or to intend real beings wherever they are, borrows from vision and employs means we owe to it. Vision alone makes us learn that beings that are different, "exterior," foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are "simultaneity"; this is a mystery psychologists handle the way a child handles explosives. Robert Delaunay says succinctly, "The railroad track is the image of succession which comes closest to the parallel: the parity of the rails." The rails converge and do not converge; they converge in order to remain equidistant down below. The world is in accordance with my perspective in order to be independent of me, is for me in order to be without me, and to be the world. The "visual quale" gives me, and alone gives me, the presence of what is not me, of what is simply and fully. It does so because, like texture, it is the concretion of a universal visibility, of a unique space which separates and reunites, which sustains every cohesion (and even that of past and future, since there would be no such cohesion if they were not essentially relevant to the same space). Every visual something, as individual as it is, functions also as a dimension, because it gives itself as the result of a dehiscence of Being. What this ultimately means is that the proper essence of the visible is to have a layer of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence...There is that which reaches the eye directly, the frontal properties of the visible; but there is also that which reaches it from below—the profound postural latency where the body raises itself to see—and that which reaches vision from above like the phenomena of flight, of swimming, of movement, where it participates no longer in the heaviness of origins but in free accomplishments. Through it, then, the painter touches the two extremities. In the immemorial depth of the visible, something moved, caught fire, and engulfed his body; everything he paints is in answer to this incitement, and his hand is "nothing but the instrument of a distant will." Vision encounters, as at a crossroads, all the aspects of Being... There is no break at all in this circuit; it is impossible to say that nature ends here and that man or expression starts here. It is, therefore, mute Being which itself comes to show forth its own meaning. Herein lies the reason why the dilemma between figurative and nonfigurative art is badly posed; it is true and uncontradictory that no grape was ever what it is in the most figurative painting and that no painting, no matter how abstract, can get away from Being, that even Caravaggio's grape is the grape itself. This precession of what is upon what one sees and makes seen, of what one sees and makes seen upon what is—this is vision itself.

Look out the window of the train: you’re moving, but you can’t remember leaving. Jagged brown crater dwellings run across the landscape, pipes with thick black smoke pouring out. Smoke overflowing, as the buildings themselves are caked with a sort of black tar. Evening sun peeks over the horizon through rusted steel water towers and other ancient skeletons. Their frames stand fixed, albeit hunched forward, anchored in by the ankles in scrap iron dunes that stretch for miles with frigid desert rats scurrying through as giant shivering Scarabs hover in the sky: wired-in and vigilant, murmuring ancient mantras, overshadowing newer, but desperately cruel partisan inscriptions of code in the soot-stained brick facade. Look at your superimposed reflection in the window across from your seat and envision subatomic particles acquiring sentience in the vacuum of an Accelerator. All wondering how it is they got there, who it is they presume to be. Always wondering. Spiraling...really! Always spiraling at breakneck speeds through the vacuum—eternally in doubt. You are suddenly reminded of the words of that great Algorithmist painter, Carlotta Wakefield, 'Mediocre painters portray that which they understand. Fabulous painters: that which they Surmise...' You wonder if that, too, applies to our constructions of reality, ersatz or otherwise. (From the short story "Leapfrog")

The molting light glowed on the horizon where darkness wriggled itself free and shook off the sun like the nymphal skin of a mayfly. The magenta sky fell down. Golden embers of fire disappeared into darkness. This was a mysterious world and he wanted to paint it. He wanted to capture it the way he saw it now. He crawled into his tent and fell asleep to the thought that we are all painters of a mysterious world, a world of colors only magic could explain, and viewed only through the prismatic distortion of our own eyes.

Mr. Jones had just started her on scraping the bottom when he came around the bow and stopped short. He shook his head in disbelief. “How did you manage to get so filthy so fast?” he said. “Didn’t I tell you to wear a painter’s cap?” Denny shrugged and squinted at him through her safety goggles. “I thought the wind would blow the old paint and junk away as I scraped it off,” she said. Mr. Jones came over and took a closer look. “Look at your hair,” he said. “Your mother’s going to kill me. Try and shake some of that junk out of it.” Denny leaned over and shook her hair in the wind. She was almost sorry she’d let it grow. Long hair was such a pain sometimes. She heard the putter of an outboard motor and looked up to see Spence making his way across the bay. “Him again,” she grumbled, but she pulled the comb out of her back pocket and started furiously tugging at her hair. Mr. Jones grinned. “Thought you couldn’t stand him,” he said. “I can’t,” said Denny, whipping off her safety glasses. “Oh,” said Mr. Jones; then he gave her a maddening smile and went back to rebuilding the cradle. Denny glanced at Spence out of the corner of her eye as he approached. He stood at the wheel, wearing a knit sailor’s cap and an old navy peacoat. A shock of blond hair stuck out under the cap and was swept back by the wind. His dark eyes squinted into the sun, and the cut of his jaw was firm and square. Denny shook her head. “You’ve been away from civilization too long,” she told herself, “when somebody like him starts looking good.

A Churchyard In Summertime by Stewart Stafford O, to stand in a quiet country churchyard, The graveyard bending in summer zephyrs, Chlorophyll light beneath swaying poplars, Rook song in twilight's nocturne. Oblivious hues spread upon canvas, Beside the somnambulant swanning river, Miasmas of midges at the water's edge, In the crosshairs of a painter's thumb. Then the sun rolls away over the horizon, A veil draws across the long day's play, A churn supper collection of basket and easel, Recollections in the slumbering night. © Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.

A good bus rider likes to take the bus, looking out the window, talking to others on the way. The trip on the bus is fun; it is not just about getting there. A good painter tries to think about what she is feeling inside her imagination, her thoughts. It is not just about painting what something looks like. A good science student likes thinking about ideas, tries to find out how things work. It is not just about learning one tiny piece of the universe.

Midsummer Dance (Midsommardans) by Anders Zorn is a prime example of how Swedish painters expressed their idea of Sweden, its traditions and its characteristic light conditions in the summer – the painting shows a dancing scene in the Swedish countryside in Dalecarlia in which couples clad in folk costumes twirl around the meadow in the wistful twilight of the early dawning sun in the midsummer night.

If you look for love and beauty, you will find it. You will find it because in doing so, you will realize that it is something that has always existed in you. Those who look for happiness or love outside of themselves will always be dissatisfied. It is like decorating your house with paintings and expecting to become a skilled painter yourself. To make a beautiful painting, you must pain. Similarly, to fill your life with love, you must first love. You cannot rely upon other people and expect them to complete you. It is something one must cultivate in oneself.

The painting was a dark line of trees behind rows of gorgeous pink lilies, the sun shining on the grass. Behind the branches, a blackness contrasted against the sunny field. Eerie eyes peered out from behind tree trunks. They were so imperceptible that I almost wouldn't have noticed them had they not been pointed out to me. It struck me as odd, considering the realist nature of the other paintings. Devin moved, and the gentle scent of his woodsy cologne brushed my nose. He stepped back and motioned to another painting. From this view point, the paintings took on fantastical elements. Wings, ears, eyes, all hidden as though Dubois himself were seeing them only from the corner of his vision.

They aren’t the author of your book, the painter of your canvas, or the speaker at your talk. So why are you letting other people choose if you do those things or not?

Writers are lost people. Nobody would write a book if they weren’t lost. Nobody would write a book if they were not in search of paradise, and nobody would be in search of paradise unless they believed it might exist somewhere, which means out there, which means just beyond my reach. Writers can see paradise, but can never touch it. Writers want to belong to a place that is just beyond their reach, because if they were to reach the place they would have to do the hard work of being in it. Writers don’t belong anywhere, or to anyone, and they do not want to. They are driven by some severance and none of them understands it. Not just writers. Painters. Musicians. Artists. Art is the search for intact things in a world in which all things are broken. That paragraph was dishonest. I am going to rewrite it. Here goes. I am a lost person. I wouldn’t write books if I wasn’t lost. I wouldn’t write anything at all if I wasn’t in search of paradise, and I wouldn’t be in search of paradise if I didn’t need it; if I didn’t think I would be less lost if I were to find it. So I write to find it… but no, not that either, because I am nearing middle-age now and I know there is nothing to find. I know now that my paradise is not in a cave on a South Sea island or in the montane rainforests of Borneo where the gibbons call or in a finca in Patagonia or down the side streets of Mexico City, in a blue house with yellow doors and shutters that the sun comes through and wakes me, and orange trees. There is no paradise out there, so I write to create my paradise on paper or on this blank, flat screen, but something in me always sabotages it and turns it dark. So then I write to reorder the world so that paradise might look possible again even for a moment, for someone. I don’t belong anywhere, or to anyone. I am driven by some severance and I don’t understand it. That’s better.

Faced with the forlorn desolation at the world’s end, Cheng Xin nonetheless felt serenity in her heart. Not long ago, she had thought her own life had reached its terminus, but now there were many reasons to continue living. She saw a sliver of blue revealed at the edge of the leaden sky, and the sun peeked out of the opening for a few minutes, instantaneously changing this cold world. It reminded her of a line from Tianming’s stories:... as if the painter of this world-picture scattered a handful of gold dust boldly over the surface of the painting. This was her life now, hope hidden in despair, warmth felt through frost.

Inks don’t forget. But with enough coaxing, occasionally they can be persuaded to forgive.

Why do you paint, Akram?” I asked. “What—” “Close your eyes, Sebastian,” he said, stopping me. “Just for a minute, close them and tell me what you see.” I did as he asked and answered, “Nothing, just black.” He tilted my head a bit to the west. “Open them now and find the blessing of vision. This abundance, the explosion, the mixture of colors, the movement, life passing by… See the sun setting? What colors can you find in the sea? Surely there are blue and gray, but don’t you also see that darker gray, light green, even black? Look at the hues of the sun drowning in the sea, melting in oranges, reds, purples. Look at those trees over there. Look at the waves, at me, at your hands, the eyes of your friends. Now, must you still ask me why I paint?” Akram replied. He then left me and walked to the tip of the yacht to enjoy the sunset and the breeze. “Artists,” I mumbled to myself.

I remarked on the quai of the Vieux-Port in Marseille, shortly before sunset, a curiously scrupulous painter struggling with skill and speed on his canvas against the fading light. The spot of color corresponding to the sun gradually descended with the sun. Finally, nothing remained. The painter suddenly discovered he was far behind: he obliterated the red from a wall, painted over one of two last gleams lingering on the water. His painting, finished for himself, for me the most unfinished thing possible, looked very sad and beautiful.

I remarked on the quai of the Vieux-Port in Marseille, shortly before sunset, a curiously scrupulous painter struggling with skill and speed on his canvas against the fading light. The spot of color corresponding to the sun gradually descended with the sun. Finally, nothing remained. The painter suddenly discovered he was far behind: he obliterated the red from a wall, painted over one of two last gleams lingering on the water. His painting, finished for himself, for me the most unfinished thing possible, looked very sad and beautiful.

Art is husbandry, I thought. It is an experiment in imaginary kinship. Bring together this mare and this stallion; this marriage and this moon; this sun and this daughter. Poems, paintings, pop songs, choreographies-all are collisions of associations, associations deliberately and also unforeseeably formed. One attempts to manage the consequences. To mitigate the damage. I know that ''moon'' evokes roundness, whiteness, coolness, night. I might not know the way it reminds you of orchids, or miscarriage, or of Victoria, British Columbia. But no, perhaps I could predict orchids. Perhaps ''orchids'' and ''moon'' seem to vibrate on the same frequency to me too, something ineffable and strong. So perhaps I put them in a poem together. Perhaps I put ''roundness'' and ''whiteness'' and ''orchids'' in a poem together, omitting ''moon." Perhaps I let these gravities work on one another, an invisible web catching meanings in it. All of this, any of this: perhaps. I may choose any word to place beside the preceding word; a painter may choose any stroke. I test the water for salinity. I listen for what goes bump with the night.

Perhaps that was what the sun subsisted on. Burning as fuel the willpower of those who lived beneath it.

The lights went down in the city, an artificial sun shining on the bay.

Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.

There are no minarets built in praise of what doubters say, no passionate talk about their lives. The coin faces of officials keep changing, but not the flame-tongued book of the sun. Be plain as day and a friend to what lasts. Cynics say the same thing over and over, "I only know what I see." Every external form is a text to study, embodying a truth, the way medicine contains healing. Does a painter paint for the sake of the picture and not for the eyes of those who will look at it?

Nothing good can come from trying to guess the gods' minds.

Sirius looked about as intelligent as the temple cats who liked to chase their own tails.

The magistrate's expression changed as quickly as if a gust of wind had blown his anger away. What replaced it forced me to glance away. It struck me too much as the same look Papinias got on his face when he discovered a new book to add to his ever-growing collection.

Sirius had the relaxed, confident demeanor Seatticans were known for...and an overall likable disposition. If you weren't being forced to marry him, that is.

[The Solon]...was a showman, a braggart, and this appealed to certain people who saw only the bravado and not where this irresponsibility might take Osteria.

He had fallen in love with landscape painting because of that element of chance and grace. He would go out to a field, to a beach, to a hill, and set himself up. As he focused on the scene before him, around him, the scene he was part of and became rooted in, it came more and more intensely alive until every leaf and every fly glinting in the sun and every dust mote demanded his attention. He felt totally open then, connected, vulnerable, better than love and more honest. In order to paint well he had to abandon control. Everything constantly changed before him and everything moved and he stood in a swirl of chaos and humbly addressed it. Whatever he put on canvas was insufficient, as love is insufficient. If he was clear, if he was open, if he was vulnerable and strong enough in his seeing, then he would grasp some spirit present and it would animate what he painted, although his first reaction was always to hate what he had done, because it failed the vast changing thingness he had astonishingly and passionately witnessed. Studio painters could dream of control, but landscape painters knew how they stood before the gods of the place, tiny, hopeful, diddling away. All he could ever paint was a tiny flash of what truly showed itself to him, a seizure on one moment.

The famous seventeenth-century Ming painter Chou Yung relates a story that altered his behavior forever. Late one winter afternoon he set out to visit a town that lay across the river from his own town. He was bringing some important books and papers with him and had commissioned a young boy to help him carry them. As the ferry neared the other side of the river, Chou Yung asked the boatman if they would have time to get to the town before its gates closed, since it was a mile away and night was approaching. The boatman glanced at the boy, and at the bundle of loosely tied papers and books—“Yes,” he replied, “if you do not walk too fast.” As they started out, however, the sun was setting. Afraid of being locked out of the town at night, prey to local bandits, Chou and the boy walked faster and faster, finally breaking into a run. Suddenly the string around the papers broke and the documents scattered on the ground. It took them many minutes to put the packet together again, and by the time they had reached the city gates, it was too late.

snowing, the snow blanketing the terrible debris. The man shivered and longed for the Mexican sun. The bodies of the victims were in the school of the small village near to where the plane had come down. The body of Vanessa Roswell had already been identified, so he went to a hotel five miles away to which the police directed him. There he found, sitting in silence before a fire in a private sitting-room, Gerald Stanton and a young woman, a beautiful young woman, he thought, gauging her with his painter’s eye, whose face now wore the numbed expression

Blown up by the warm wind and illuminated by the sun, Anna’s creamy dress was a large, bright spot against the meadow greenery full of small flowers. The effect was excellent, distinctly painterly, worthy of Claude Monet. Against the backdrop of the grass, Anna looked like a huge, well-fed cabbage white butterfly.