Sorry for my hiatus from here, one tends to forget all places where some attempts have been made to set up a website. And just as I was directing my thoughts to this, lo I am receiving some reminder about my blogger - not sure still what feedspot is though.
Of late all the previous posts about my hopes to create various series of works are still applicable but of course as flawed as I am as a human being, new ideas and influences flow in all the time and old things come back around.
Of late I am so drawn to the paintings and drawings of Norman Lindsay and there is a real 'Antipodean Thelema' that I get from his works. I am reminded of some chapters from The Book of Lies. Unfortunately the Australian art scene was and perhaps still is in some ways quite conservative. Lindsays work was just too provocative for his time and even still, I find the way in which I drew his figures to be so sensual, but its the expressions on their faces that really make them catch my eye.
Lindsay was also unbelievably prolific, and unlike Dore these were not so far as I am aware being finished by artisans in his employ. All his own, I cannot fathom how so much beautiful imagery was able to be created. Two examples of his work.
Lindsays work will from this time on and forever feed me in terms of influence and inspiration as Dore, as Bogoureau, Alam Tadema, Gerome, Messonier, Donato, von Stuck, Ruan Jia, James Gurney, all the Symbolists, the Orientalists and Pre Raphaelities really - and of course I will never be great like these artists, but I cannot stop trying to bring forth, bring together, etc something anything. I certainly not putting myself in their pantheons rather just expressing my joy over how much they energise me when I look at their work.
Amidst some work for upcoming exhibition contributions, I have always the need to make my own works for good or ill and some which are still in progress. Some new ones that are up on my deviantart page, but dozens and dozens which are in progress. It would be great if i could just stick strictly to one thing at a time, but like books it is always easy to start something, but to bring it through to fruition is the fourth virtue of the magician - silence, which is as I see it perseverance. Of course posting here about it ones pursuit might at least to all appearance contravene this though. In broad strokes yes, but I am also interested that others have seen this blog and feel not a little embarassed that I do not attend to it more often. And perhaps (and maybe hopefully!) no one reads this, as the more I write the more I see all that stands in the way of continuing private magickal practices. I feel both drawn to and repulsed by exposing myself on the internet and at times i have even felt it very palpably that the anxiety exposes me psychically too. Why do we not only want to put down thoughts in diarys designed for everyone to see. Perhaps diarys have always been written with the thought in the back of the mind that "were someone to read this...".
Our meta-narrative of progress is an easy way to write history at best, really I see more that human mundane world is one of continual exteriorisation - a continual casting out. Computers and the internet are examples of this. People consider whether children need to learn history, geography and science even, and rather just learn how to better locate the information online. but then even that too will be cast out. Why do we do this, what does the brain want to be left with? or is this just us becoming more of a an enormous singular organ or the opposite. Is it good, is it bad.. is it beyond all such, is it as good as repression is bad ? Where are we on the Tree of Life? what is going down and what is coming up. And amidst all this is the Tree of Night, the black flame, the consciousness that creates, that questions, that is a down-going and over-going.
Just something I started back in April this year - John Martin another inspiration but also a feeling o humanity being constantly on the precipice of cataclysm - this is a narrative we play up too, and how things like the fall of the Roman Empire are imagined - romanticising sublime horror, its something happening in dreams, relations between some inner musical spheres always...chaos..
