Black and white or colour?

Black and white or colour? That's my dilema at the moment, it's one of those essential questions in life. Anyway this is an image I worked on a while ago and I just couldn't decide, so I just did both!

The earth drinks my blood

And on it goes, it flies it spies
Yes this plunder this demise.
My broken soul it listens close,
for a distant tune it toils and gropes
The holes in your soul give skin to my sin
I bathe in this fallen glory I’m in.

Blissful ignorance

This is the second part of the series I began in my 'Birth of Eve' post. I'm not a hundred percent sure if it's finished yet and i'm deliberating between black and white or colour. We'll see. Hope you like!

Close encounters

Pre booked, packaged deal tourism is underated. I've just spent the last week on the most amazing holiday with my fam at Victoria Falls and Safaring through Botswana. Botswana was incredible, with a population of around 1 million and 70% of its land mass covered by the Kalahari Desert much of its land is uninhabited and untamed, much as it has been for a very very long time.   

I've never really been particularly keen on animals, and the concept of a Safari never really did it for me. But in this context I ate my preconceptions. No fences, no tar roades, not a hint of domestication. Hippos, lions and crocs eyeing us with disdain as we rumbled past in our open air truck gawking and snapping at what we were once apart of.

Chemical communication between trees and trees that live off the life of another, growing upon the other's bark and then strangling the life out of it with its roots until the first tree is dead and the strangler stands in its stead. Dung beatles that attract their mates by rolling up balls of cow shit and birds that mate for life.

I have posted a few photos, and although photography is not really my thing, sometimes it's undeniable that nature, (even if i've only provided pale two dimentional imitations) is far more profound than anything I can conjure up with my mere mortal mind.

Birth of Eve

I'm quite a fan of this one, even if I do say so myself. I'm thinking of expanding it into a series. Hmmm.

Storm time!

I do love a good storm! Here's a little watercolour...

Blinding blinding the sun burns bright,

With white it blinds me this heavens light.

And as my soul takes a gasp for air,

The darkness hounds me with devils snare

It strokes and it fuels and rips out my insides.

So goes my life between morning and night.

Lost in night

This is an etching I dug up from long ago. I don't know how much I like it, but here it is anyway.

Washed in on the shore, my nostrils are filled with salt. I’m all glazed eyes and twisted limbs as I lay limp and soaked to the core, staring into my own dead imagination.

Where I am

Life in all its profanity, its beauty, its blood drawing claws, its here, unabashed, unbridled permeating each atom of every soul. And so it flows through you and me; free. 

Featured in Blanket Magazine!

Hello! My work 'On the Eve of the Seventh Day' http://appleofmyeye-dinesha.blogspot.com/2010/09/on-eve-of-seventh-day.html has been featured in Blanket - a magazine that uncovers emerging artists from around the world. I'm quite excited I must say, it's my first time being published anywhere!

  

Since they plugged me, I thought I'd afford them the same courtesy- seriously there are some really interesting and beautiful pieces inside. It's only $2 to buy online or free for a sneek peek.   http://blanketmagazine.com/ 

Here's another one of my works, just to add some colour to this post.

Pretty little flower things!

These doodles are inspired by my grandmother (achchi) who taught me to love art. She used to sketch circular floral patterns starting from the centre and working outward. She was a Buddhist and an art teacher in Sri Lanka so I assume that this style was derived from the colourful mandalas that decorated the inner walls of Buddhist temples.

Girl.

The end of days, of flower kites,

of magic rain and fairy sights,

of silkworm stars and floating hearts;

girl can’t you see reason?!

And so begins the cocoon she weaves,

Of stainless steel and processed meat

And in this cage she will stay

Until she learns to fly again.

A moment stuck in time

 The temptation is to stay. To linger a little longer in this semblance of youth, dancing in a moment stuck in time.

To stagnate is to drink the dull wine of confusion that numbs your senses and leaves your mind reeling, directionless, spinning spinning, purposeless, listless, restless.

From where would this clarity be borne? What is its method, this clear sight? At each crossing we’re born and born again, lost in placenta, tearing for truth.

Each day eternity imposes itself on my solace, then leaves me hanging without taking root.

On the eve of the Seventh Day

Where I am





It feels heavenly to be out. There I felt like one of those solitary trees encased in concrete; safe and well cared for perhaps, but walled in and tied up, unable to feel my earth and grow.

Here the wet season is rounding up; the grass lush, green and overgrown, dirt roads sodden with rain, transformed into broken terrain that can’t be travelled. The hills roll and curl and in my eyes will always suggest the curves of contentedly lounging women. It’s bliss for an art lover to be in a place where the eye is constantly pleased. The land, it saturates me and sates me in those deeper unexplainable parts.

Yet it’s impossible to miss the stench of decaying souls, the brutal stain of history for which fifteen years is a mere blink. Death is spread through the compensation of the emasculated man coupled with the woman who’s known not love and sees her body as a tool rather than a temple. And the child. What of the child in this burning flesh? Raped, beaten, broken, helpless hopeless, history takes another bout of itself.

To those of us who are apart of the university generation of the west where everything is a cause and an experience, poverty can seem almost glamourous. To sit huddled together in a house with a leaking roof and two candles lit is quaint and cosy, and to have only six items of clothing in your possession brings a simpler clearer perspective to life- reduces the clutter.

But I am beginning to learn that to have nothing to lose is not freedom because there is no choice; you are still bound by desire. Perhaps if you possess and then you choose to lose- to purge, to cleanse- perhaps then having nothing can lead to freedom but no freedom can exist while you’re left wanting. I am also learning the capacity that people have to be nasty, that people are a lot crueller than I had deemed possible and there is a lot that can be hidden behind a bright smile and a slick tongue

But everything in me is better being here, I am fully present. Never depressed, lonely, unfulfilled, empty, but elated, ecstatic, torn apart, flabbergasted, enraged, devastated, scared, full of joy, ready, strong, capable.

*****

 

The sun was hot red in a way that drenched the entire sky.

The bounty of hills below carried a tender glow that refused to be ignored, even in its comparative subtlety. Such is the alluring guise of a pulpit of hell littered with what were once people. Now it is shadows that walk, redeemable perhaps, but shadows nonetheless, shadows and shells in a gleaming space.

It was the civilised who took them. Jesus on their tongues and guns in their hands. Amen. Clean white hands marked black men with blood. As the time passes the blood continues to soak into the cracks of the earth and from these roots are generations born.

The sun was hot red in a way.