I spent my weekend in a graphic workshop learning the art of cyanotype. Or, to be more precise, studying the method of cyanotype – the art will hopefully enter into my work as I go along. Cyanotype is a nineteenth century photographic process using chemicals that produce beautiful blue prints when exposed to sunlight. The…
Category: Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson on “vernacular scholarship”
Today I will recommend GENEVIEVE HUDSON interview with Maggie Nelson at Bookslut, here is an excerpt: I need to talk back, or talk with, theorists and philosophers in ordinary language, to dramatize how much their ideas matter to me in my everyday life. I can’t really partake in straightforward academic writing because its language…
“How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!”
Proverb by Steve Reich (1995) Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is in part inspired by the writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein, both his Remarks on Colour and his style has been of great influence to Nelson. As Nelson the composer Steve Reich is also inspired by Wittgenstein. A single line: “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!” is the…
Becoming intimate with fear
—Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry. (Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value * Maggie Nelson: I’ve often written about things that terrify me—likely out of compulsion more than hope for comfort, or catharsis; as Peter Handke says near the end of his horrified memoir of his mother’s suicide, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,…
any color you like …
I’ve been reading a lot about the symbolic meaning of color lately, but what do seeing color really looks like? Green Parsley, Gelatin Silver Print, 2010 [from “Any Color You Like”] © Matthew Gamber North American Birds Exhibit, Gelatin Silver Print, 2010 [FROM “ANY COLOR YOU LIKE”] © MATTHEW GAMBER These beautiful images by Matthew Gamber made me…
How come blue is the color of melancholy?
Today my study of Bluets has led me home – Edvard Munch, Melankoli (Melancholy), oil on canvas, 1892 © National Gallery, Oslo As with many of Edvard Munch‘s works, “Melancholy” appears in several different versions and techniques. (His repeated use of the same concepts has made it difficult to identify some works due to the lack of…
There would seem to be a lesson here, but I am not prepared to describe it –
While writing a book, I’m influenced by things the same way I would imagine most writers are: I look for what I want to steal, then I steal it, and make my own weird stew of the goods – Maggie Nelson * writing Bluets * ludwig wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) *
I want to die painting – (among myriad triumphs of blueness)
In her book; Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, Patricia Albers tells us: Rilke looked to painting, especially Cézanne’s, as a model for poetry. In late 1907, the writer visited the Paris Salon d’Automne nearly every day, seeking to memorize the work of the Post-Impressionist, whose discipline, nuance, precision, and chromatic emotion he emulated. Having visually devoured the blues…
Blue in itself
YVES KLEIN: IKB 79 (1959), PAINT ON CANVAS ON PLYWOOD IKB 79 is one of nearly two hundred blue monochrome paintings made by Yves Klein. Klein began making monochromes in 1947, considering them to be a way of rejecting the idea of representation in painting and therefore of attaining creative freedom. The letters IKB stand for International Klein Blue,…
measuring blueness
Delving into Blue(ts) Today I have been reading about cyanometry and the cyanometer. CYANOMETRY: The study and measurement of the blueness of light; the measurement of intensity of blue light, especially of the blue of the sky. The cyanometer is attributed to Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740–99), a Swiss physicist and geologist, famous for his studies of the…
sub rosa 