Books and notebooks.

I love the smell of filter coffee and oil paint when I enter the studio. That coffee maker I got in October is probably one of the best investments I’ve made in a long time!

I am busy painting, I am working on a series of 30×40 cm paintings on board. They’re stills from my Super 8 film, I just got started on the seventh one today. I have a title for the film now. It’s called You had another skin It’s taken from a short story by J.P Sartre called “The Room”. Even if the work doesn’t have much to do with the content of the novel itself, I felt very inspired by this particular line: “I held your hand. You had another skin. I believed all you told me”. I really recommend the story, it’s about a woman who cares for her mentally ill husband, despite everybody around her wanting him to be locked away so that she can have her life back, but she doesn’t feel that she belongs to the outside world anymore, she has become merely an observer of the life that goes on below the window of their 6th floor apartment. Sometimes she secretly longs to be mad too, so that she could feel more connected to her husband.

That idea of having another skin and of shedding one’s skin really speaks to me. Below are some excerpts from my notebook, if you can read my handwriting that is…

Here are some books that I absolutely love, recommend and get a lot of inspiration from:

They are:
* The Faber book of Utopias – ed. John Carey
* Det Omedvetna (Psychology of the Unconscious) – C.G Jung
* Notes from underground and The Double – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
* The existential imagination – ed. F.R Karl and L. Hamalian
* The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
* Intimacy – J.P Sartre

Notebook:

A drawing of some scrap metal and machinery at Zinkgruvan mine, Sweden. Oct ’10.

I am waiting for the Super 8 film to be transferred to DV tape. Then I’ll consider the addition of a soundtrack to the digital version. As you may or may not know Super 8 film is silent. You used to be able to buy sound film for certain cameras which enabled sound recording, but that stock was discontinued in the ’80’s so today only film stock without sound is available. I am also waiting for a couple of rolls of slide film I shot in Sweden over Christmas to return back from the lab in Leeds. Fingers crossed they haven’t got lost in the post. I shot winter woods at dusk and returned back to the semi-abandoned village Björnhammaren to shoot my favourite street of abandoned houses covered in snow. Understandably no one cares to clear away the snow there, so I had to struggle through snow up to my thighs. I’m anxious to see the result!

Also, I have made four ink drawings on primed, unstretched canvas of houses in the above mentioned street (they were completed before Christmas). They are to feature in a reunion exhibition for the GMIT graduating class of 2008 in the Lorg Printmakers Gallery, Galway in mid February. Here’s a sample:

That’s all for now!