Or What You See is What You Get….
Last weekend, while my son and I were waiting to go up to the top of Notre-Dame de Paris (like good tourists, absolutely, I’ve always been drawn despite myself to France’s great remodeller of the Middle Ages, Viollet-le-Duc, and besides, Notre-Dame is where Gothic architecture first got off the ground) we were also happily indulging in one of our cruellest and most cowardly pastimes – listening in on other tourists’ conversations.
In front of us were three students from L.A. and Vancouver (of all places), who were chatting about what to see in Paris, (“There’s a great shop that sells 4 t-shirts for 15 Euros, it’s the cheapest I’ve found.” or ” I wanna get some key chains, the tackiest ones I can find!”) when one chirped up: “My teacher said to forget the Louvre; y’know like you can only look at so many portraits and vases of flowers.”
Now there’s a nutshell of solid advice thought I, and it certainly leaves more precious time for the t-shirts and keychains, but…
It is incredibly difficult to differentiate what we see from what we recognize. Recognition is what gets us through life. All those shiny bulky fast-moving things on wheels I recognize as cars, which keeps me from getting run over by them and allows me to find my own in the parking lot.
Or when the crosswalk light is green, which enhances my chances of NOT getting squashed by those other things. I recognize a thousand little signs that allow me to find my way, whether it’s in the street or in a conversation.
But do I really see any of them?
Admittedly, it is not advisable to constantly psychoanalyse the people around you, nor to be caught in mid-boulevard contemplating a particularly fetching bit of texture in the asphalt when that little green light has gone a different colour and a phalanx of those bulky shiny things with wheels are bearing down on you, but…
The world provides us with a wealth of locations where you can forget your physicality and simply SEE. (Take the Louvre for example. You know, that place with the portraits and potted plants.)
The entire Howe family spent most of the day in the Louvre, ecstatic over aquamaniles, seduced by ceramics, rapt over reliquaries and just generally SEEING. We emerged footsore but enchanted, vowing to go back next time with a trio of sketchbooks.
There is just so much LIFE in all these dead things a museum contains. Things made by hands and minds so similar but so far removed from our own.
So, take that glass case of dull ceramics. What I recognize is that it is full of old pottery. What I SEE is something else. I see the hands that made each piece, the minds and the culture that shaped the clay, glazed it and fired it. I see the passing of time that has dulled it, broken it, removed it from our world; I see time like a wave ebbing, leaving a few bits of flotsam in the wake that is today.
I envy the shapes and forms, their simplicity or their complexity but in all cases their honesty and integrity. I see commonplace objects that may have possessed a singular grace in the hands and homes of their makers. They are filled to overflowing with the humanity that shaped them.
My hands itch, I want to sketch them and understand them inside and out, absorb them so that one day, in a drawing I may never do, I can recall that depth of reality and pass on somehow what I’ve received. Some small shred of that reality that binds us to life and to the commonplace and extraordinary trappings thereof.
The same goes for everything made by the long-dead men and women whose creations, dulled by time and culled by serendipity, grace the dusty shelves of our cultural inheritance.
All this to say that if I stop at what I recognize, I stop learning. I stop at what I know, which is precious little. Boring portraits and potted plants in sum…
FNAC & BNF PARIS
It seems to me loads of pictures were taken.
There are some here:
http://photos.staffeurs.org/Alanna/photos/johnhowe040117/johnhowe040117.htm
And some more here:
http://www.go-to-sleep.net/galerie/vis_galerie.php?idgalerie=9&type=sortie
And some more there:
http://www.go-to-sleep.net/galerie/vis_galerie.php?idgalerie=12&type=sortie
GETTING COLLECTABLE
Sideshow has produced a VERY nice print of one of the pieces I did for the movies.
You can see it, along with all the other details, here:
http://www.sideshowtoy.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=8603
Hopefully this will spur me to actually create, with Dom’s inestimable aid, a new section on the site that will keep track of stuff to buy. Hmmm, now there’s a good title…
GETTING BEHIND
Despite my brave New Year’s resolution to catch up on my mail, I’ve already failed miserably and it’s not even the end of January. Nothing is lost, though, just delayed. I will reply, promise. (I hope.)
CATCHING UP
The Tolkien exhibition is opening once again, this time in Châlons-en Champagne, on the 7th of February, if I recall correctly. (Luckily for me, they have a web site, so I can double-check…)
http://www.chalons-en-champagne.net/bmvr/
On the 6th, we’ll be doing the last limited print of the current series (the one before was Glorfindel and the Balrog) this time the Fall of Gondolin. (I think… )
