Top Two: Paintings by Charline Von Heyl; these are currently at the ICA. I must say that the image on the right, which is from a card advertising the exhibition, does very little justice for the actual work. The colors are much more vibrant and have a mysterious glow to them. I found these paintings particularly inspiring because of Von Heyl's statements on the press release for the show, from which I understood that her paintings were not of things or abstractions of things. Instead, they seemed to be made just because. I wouldn't say that they were generated from pure 'play', or that they have no associations, but I found it pleasing to see work that did not seem to have an obvious agenda.
On the left is from my sketchbook. I was testing different black mediums together by layering and mixing, followed by some line-work with chalk.
Bauchelard Response:
What resounded with me from Bauchelard’s text was his idea that one easily dreams of a house with a primitive kind of intimacy while already in one’s own home. He suggests that one likes to imagine a sort of displacement of the reality that normally surrounds one’s home, which is then replaced by surroundings that allow one to feel seclusion and, at the same time, protected by the home. This seems to me to be the “joy of inhabiting” – the ability to comfort or grant ourselves reassurance by our inhabitance of a personal space.
I feel that our ability to do so is inhibited by distractions, especially in an urban environment. The situations that Bauchelard describes or cites from other sources seem to be relatively isolated to begin with, and he makes no indication of how sound from the external world could affect one while one is within a personal space. He does, however, mention the prospect of ‘naturalizing’ a sound to make it less hostile, such as Balzac’s ability to imagine the city roar as the roar of an ocean. Yet I am skeptical of this. I think living in the city makes one accustomed, to a degree, to the sounds of the city. Nevertheless, I find them distracting. The fact that my mind immediately associates most city sounds with an object does not allow me the fortune of imagining them to be more pleasant things – a prerequisite task, it seems, for the dreamer in the house to enter the conscious and cosmic reality of their oneiric home.
Otherwise, I have to agree with Bauchelard. There were spaces within my childhood home that I still imagine myself in from time to time (with significant distortions on them, of course). And it is almost never that, while in my apartment now, I daydream of another house that I have lived at. I find myself daydreaming in similar ways about my current inhabitance that I did as a child of my home then, and that my arrangement of my home now is not that different from the ways I had arranged my spaces when I was younger. Thus I also find myself agreeing with his notion that we have certain ways of inhabiting a space that we cling to for our lives.
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