[jem-visual-diary]

“We grow. It hurts at first.”

[paintedout]

Agnes Martin, Untitled #3, 2003

[arterialtrees]

Anselm Kiefer, The Obscure Clarity that Falls from the Stars, 1996, acrylic, 0il, emulsion, sunflower seeds on canvas

[iamjapanese]

Benoit Trimborn（French, b.1976）

Agios Georgios   oil on canvas  200 x 120cm    via   more

[garadinervi]

Josef Albers, The color in my painting, n.d. [Josef Albers papers, 1929-1970, Box 1, Folder 4: Writings by Josef Albers, circa 1936-1966, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation]

[dearorpheus]

"Let me offer a simple observation. There is a greater contrast between the moon and the night sky than there is between the sun and the daytime sky. And this contrast is more conducive to sorrow, which always separates or isolates itself, than it is to happiness, which always joins or blends. And to stand face-to-face with the sun is preposterous—it would blind you. Every child is taught not to stare at the sun. The sun is the source of life itself, the great creative power. One cannot confront god without instant annihilation; you can't look directly at Medusa, but you can look at her useless reflection. The moon has no light of its own; our apprehension of it is but a reflection of the sun. And some believe artists reflect the creative powers of some original impulse too great to name. Another thing: the moon is the very image of silence—and, as Charles Simic says, "The highest levels of consciousness are wordless." The great lunacy of most lyric poems is that they attempt to use words to convey what cannot be put into words. On the other hand, stars were the first text, the first instance of gabbiness; connecting the stars, making a pattern out of them, was the first story, sacred to storytellers. But the moon was the first poem, in the lyric sense, an entity complete in itself, recognizable at a glace, one that played upon emotions so strongly that the context of time and place hardly seemed to matter."

— Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack and Honey: Collected Lectures

[seekingstars]

Chen Chen

[kitchen-light]

“To know the night is a lot like knowing poetry, and knowing poetry requires what Keats called “negative capability,” the capacity for “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” To know the night means having the clarity that some things are and should be and always will be hidden, for the night has been, or is, or should always be, the time of lovers, revolutionaries, and other conspirators. The night world is that which should be, or once always was, veiled.”

— Anne Boyer, from her essay “The Fall of Night”, Lapham’s Quarterly, Volume XII, Number 1 | Winter 2019 (via kitchen-light)

[serratedpens]

Elina Zhang, "My Year of Light"

[heteroglossia]

This world is not a home to you.

“This world you seem to live in is not home to you. And somewhere in your mind you know that this is true. A memory of home keeps haunting you, as if there were a place that called you to return, although you do not recognize the voice, nor what it is the voice reminds you of. Yet still you feel an alien here, from somewhere all unknown. Nothing so definite that you could say with certainty you are an exile here. Just a persistent feeling, sometimes not more than a tiny throb, at other times hardly remembered, actively dismissed, but surely to return to mind again. No one but knows whereof we speak. Yet some try to put by their suffering in games they play to occupy their time, and keep their sadness from them. Others will deny that they are sad, and do not recognize their tears at all. Still others will maintain that what we speak of is illusion, not to be considered more than but a dream. Yet who, in simple honesty, without defensiveness and self-deception, would deny he understands the words we speak? We speak today for everyone who walks this world, for he is not at home. He goes uncertainly about in endless search, seeking in darkness what he cannot find; not recognizing what it is he seeks. A thousand homes he makes, yet none contents his restless mind. He does not understand he builds in vain. The home he seeks can not be made by him. There is no substitute for Heaven. All he ever made was hell.”

[pigmenting]

“For nature and art are in this way twins: they are both beautiful, and dreadful, and in love with change.”

— Mary Oliver, from Winter Hours

[jem-visual-diary]

by Jem Magbanua

[jem-visual-diary]

by Jem Magbanua

[pigmenting]

“As a writer, you pour so much energy into a piece, and when it flutters out into the world, you’re rarely there to see it arrive in readers’ minds and hearts. You don’t witness the impact. It’s so different than being a musician or actor or dancer—where there is an energy return from the audience in real-time.”

— GennaRose Nethercott, interviewed for Neon Pajamas

[loumargi]

Stanisław Wyspiański • Wild Flowers, 1893

[jem-visual-diary]

By Chih-Hung Kuo, Study of Landscape 49, 2017, Oil on paper

[thunderstruck9]

Zhou Chunya (Chinese, b. 1955), Flowers, 1999. Oil on canvas, 100 x 79.9 cm.