5 looooooooong sentences

Many different experiences with art, people, museums and monuments have helped to shape me as an artist and a human being. These range from the blue mosque in Istanbul with its calm and distant splendor to the serenity of the sculpture garden in Goodwood, England to movies like David Lynch's Mulholland Drive where time and place are blurred, and one is never exactly sure of the truth. One experience in particular remains with me though: the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor which at the time that I visited them were freely accessible to the visitor. Once inside one enters the quiet of the underworld from over 3000 years ago, passing through hieroglyph covered corridors that are leading deeper into the baking hot rock. It is absolutely quiet, and the mysterious walls provide a connection to humanity which is revealed not through exact deciphering of the text but through the dark and dreamlike atmosphere they create and the silence of death they speak of.

6 months later

Look at this amazing decay, six months to the day after its fresh and beautiful first appearance!

charred

A little exercise on charcoal.
In my exploration of materials that I may want to work with I came upon charcoal. It has such beautiful and deep blackness, and keeps the texture of its origin. One problem was immediately obvious:
It has a strong tendency to crumble! So I tried a variety of ways to aide its coherence: I covered it in epoxy resin which of course sticks the whole thing together but ends up giving it an unnatural sheen. I also melted beeswax into it, which tends to soak into the material and is also conceptually more in tune. I also painted a crevice of it with oil paint mixed with galkyd.. This makes it a little overly dramatic, so probably should be used sparingly...

The Right Thing

Thinking about perspectives and the question of where is right and where is wrong.
There is the absolute right which are things like the law, or the Ten Commandments, which describe as a common denominator the rules by which we all should live. No wrong will come to anyone as long as everyone abides by these rules. The relative right describes what is right for a person, and does not necessarily have to be right for another person. This allows for a certain blurriness between right and wrong, or at least allows for the fact that more than one thing can be right.
Ultimately we all start from this perspective, and it is the artists' obligation to explore the universal within his or her personal right perspective.
This then becomes a lot about identity and the feeling of belonging. Strong national and cultural identity allows for a strong sense of belonging, but for the price of a narrower perspective on what is going on outside of that circle. Increased migration and more frequent mobility between different cultures has forced people to feel at home in more diverse cultural circumstances, but often paid for with a sense of uprooting. Although this loss of cultural perspective can be perceived as emptiness, it also opens up a wider perspective on human existence, providing room to explore that border zone beyond reason and before faith.
It contains the questions of the end of knowledge:
Will space exploration ever allow us to understand the infinite emptiness of the universe, and give us an answer to the question of wether we are alone or not?
Does knowing more and more details about the genetics and molecular biology of our brains get us any closer to understanding how we think and how we feel?
How do we respond to the certainty of our own death and what is the reason for hope?
So does Mr Pin Stripe Suite really have the answers to the questions we all want to know???