cuttlefish and other glories

Just off the headland, yesterday, I saw a little shark eating up a big cuttlefish.

A giant cuttlefish, it was.

The sea, while pretending to ignore me, is in fact putting on quite some show.
There is no use in me feigning false ignorance, otherwise I get shown a predator eating its prey. Or bump into something that is about-to-be-prey, which is almost as bad.
The Dolphins curl over and around like horizontal commas,the sharks are always an imperative exclamation.
Still, it isnt punctuation that comes to mind when a large shape emerges: the fins look the same enough.


So, the sea-lion enclosure is the safest place to be. Trouble for some, is that the water in here cools down quite rapidly during the night, as opposed to the sea temperature, which stays warm.

Oh, but I love it, the cold of winter water.

It rinses the gills and provides clarity of thought. And here, safe, one can dream undisturbed by predators and prey alike.

The sea has stopped sulking, I gather.
Whether or not this is a plot with which to cure one of wanderlust I can't be sure, but
the whales appeared today, four Southern Right Whales.
They gave themselves away not only with their spouting, but the sun reflecting off their bodies, briefly, as they jumped about.
Some cuttlefish bodies have been presented to me on the tideline, just to remind me who is the uber-being around here. They are rather large, and don't think for a minute I am ignorant as to what the teethmarks mean.

I just pretend that I'm not scared.


(cuttlefish 32cm long)

Sybil

This is an old friend of mine, Sybil.
She is from Delphi, originally, but now resides in Rome. Rather high up in the Sistine Chapel, as it happens, quite a posh address.

I have been to visit her a few times, one time I lay on the floor to have a leisurely chat, but that was frowned upon and anyway, someone stood on me.

I own a book with her face printed in it, she is rather a famous friend and doesn't really have much time for chats. I did try and do this drawing from life, but I was compelled to instead purchase a picture and sit nearby and copy it. Which is sort of a strange concept and brings up thoughts of Walter Benjamin and "authenticity" and the aura of the original object. But I did render her , I thought, rather cautiously and carefully, reflecting my reverent attitude towards her.

So, I witnessed the authentic, the real, and produced a reproduction of a reproduction and then I gave her a lovely background of Winsor and Newton Bronze metallic gouache. To make her special and holy: Michelangelo would have been rotating in his crypt like a barbecued chook, given all those efforts he made to create volume and space and here's me giving her a very retrograde byzantine icon-style makeover.

Nonetheless, I have always loved her. Plus, being a Sybil, I was hoping she may have been forthcoming with a few portentious comments about my future, but she stayed mute on that side of things, sadly.

studio

Time to make things, time to get down to it, time to think about things I've read and dreamed.
Time to fly away into the Fifi zone.
Time to smell the cadmium orange, time to smear wax, scratch the buff titanium and let run the Madder lake,
wipe and spread the cobalt blue, time to listen to the sing of naples Yellow,

Time to softly scratch the charcoal time to put seaweed in the sky time to sing about nabokov and listen to the memory of panes of glass covered by curtains. Gum Turpentine smells green even.

time to run my finger along the edge of arches paper, six hundred forty grams per square inch, cold pressed, look how it stands up by itself.
Paper,
I love paper.



I am being looked at on monday. Time to get busy, in the nest of fish