The Three Graces

After our conversation in class today, I decided I had to get the truth about bodies from a man, to get an idea of the context.

I rang my friend, and got him to look at the picture of The Three Graces.

What do you think of those girls? I asked.

They're curvaceous, was his first response.

In comparison to the girls you see in magazines and pictures now?

I like these ones better.

Do you think they would have been pretty girls?

I reckon they would have been beautiful.

GOMA TOMORROW

APT6

My favourite work from the APT 6 so far...

Sopheap Pich, 'Buddha' (from the 1979 series)

Rattan, wire,

dye sculpture

His series of sculptures titled 1979 is inspired by Pich’s childhood memories of his family’s journey across Cambodia, at the end of the Khmer Rouge era (1975–79). As an eight year old, he remembers having been confused by the strange objects – mines, bombs and shells – he saw littering the countryside: ‘I didn’t know where they came from. From the sky? From the war?’

After many days of walking, Pich’s family settled temporarily in the grounds of the Wat Ta Mim temple in Battambang. He recalls his experience of entering the temple:

. . . there was a feeling of fear, of haunt. Inside the temple, on the ceiling, and floor, red all over. On the other end was ghostly, shadowy shapes of different objects unclear to me at the time, but this was a place where statues are located.

God, I just think this is magnificent. I love the fluidity of the lines as they unwrap. It's beautiful. I'm still contemplating the meaning of the piece a bit, but I'll get back to you. For now, it's a stunning installation, so different to everything else I saw on the website. A lot more simple, I think, than a lot of the other pieces.

The Greatest Question to Face Mankind...

Where to place that red dot?

The ultimate question.

One that I answered in todays art lesson.

I loved so many of the other students artworks - I loved the fluidity in some of the works... a fluidity I can't seem to muster in my own art. I'm beginning to think my arm just doesn't go like that... I watch Bonnie work - her whole arm in motion, gliding across the paper, hardly touching the paper with her charcoal - and my arm would never do that. I find it difficult to apply such minimal pressure to the page. Try?

The labyrinth has a path built into it, but there appear to be many ways to take that path. Following one pathway, and turning back is all part of the journey, so it looks like I'll be experimenting with vigour to expand my personal aesthetic - or, at least, play around with it.

Labyrinth, labyrinth, labyrinth. Should everybody's path be the same?

2010... TIME TO ENTER THE LABYRINTH

"Please somebody get me out of this labyrinth!"

Simón Bolívar's last words (Venezuelan politician. Led the Latin American community in their rebellion against Spain, circa 1815-20.)

"It's not life or death, the labyrinth."

"Um, OK. So what is it?"

"Suffering," she said. "Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about living or dying? How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?"

an extract from Looking for Alaska, by John Green.

Until this unit, I never saw the metaphor of the labyrinth as something to embrace. The labyrinth... since I saw that movie with David Bowie in it of the same name, I saw it as a place or monsters and of suffering and turmoil (don't even get me started on Pan's Labyrinth... that movie is kind of scary...). My reading led me to continue with this mindset. When I read Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's account of Simon Bolivar, The General in his Labyrinth, the labyrinth was used as an unspecific metaphor throughout the text whenever Bolivar considered taking his own life.

Looking for Alaska dissects this particular text and analyses the theme of the labyrinth in depth, first thinking of it as death or oncoming death, then as life itself, then as suffering (as seen above). In all respects of the labyrinth, however, it is seen as something to get out of, to escape, and to forget.

According to the almighty Wikipedia, the primary difference between a maze and labyrinth is that the purpose of a maze is to lure and capture, and a labyrinth is constructed with a path to follow. I think this idea of "oh god, just somebody get me out of this damn labyrinth" comes from the endlessness that an elaborate labyrinth would encompass, and also a lack of patience within the labyrinth created by fear. I think that life, death, or suffering could be used synonymously with this idea of the labyrinth. Death is simple without fear. Life is simple without fear. Suffering, and the labyrinth are simple when we do not fear it.

After looking at the labyrinth as a vessel of suffering for so long, it was a bit difficult to enable myself to embrace it. So, what is the labyrinth?

Is it a passage, a road? Then why take it- to walk in, get lost, and walk out again?

Or is it a journey? One to suffer, to live, to die, all in one single manifestation?

Do we ever really get out of the labyrinth, and are you sure we entered just this year?

This year will be a journey through the labyrinth, but as an artist or otherwise, I can guarantee it's not my first time I've walked through this space.