097. Stones

Catherine Singer has a series of photographs called "Sea Jewels", with lovely composition of flotsam/jetsam against glistening black stones; I chose her "Sea Jewel 3" as inspiration for today. Paired with the closest thing I have to a brand or avatar, a highly photoshopped picture of a split stone also from Iceland. The weight and pressure of the glaciers fractures the stones underneath, and when the water melts, the split stone shape is left behind on the moraine.

I am a little thing, washed up here on the stones, so hard and glossy and rounded and unyielding.
I am mostly water myself, and will soon shrivel and dry and lose myself to the wind.

I am a little thing, under the pressing ice, so thick and heavy and  cold and pressing. 

I am only stone myself, and will soon fracture and break apart into an igneous skeleton. 

049. Monochrome

The last couple of days I have been happy to see Catherine Singer has some new posts over at 100 Days of Art 2000 - Iceland. I could pick every picture for inspiration but I chose today her "Small 1" for the beautiful simplicity of the image, and the monochrome palette. Paired with a heavily cropped & edited image from Iceland in 2009. The base of the image was a pattern in a bubbling grey mud pool. and some colour/overpainting was added in the editing process.  Today I am very concious of time pressures, & the gaps in this 100 days that I need to go back and fill; but I wanted to post today's so that the backlog would not prevent me from keeping going.

"They" say Hekla will erupt soon, but soon means different things to journalists and to geologists.
Your timescales are different to mine, but the colour in my world is there because of you.

026. Fragile

Today's post is inspired by two of my favourite-so-far participants in the 100 days project, and a newbie. I know there is so much to see in the project, and with the type of pieces I am doing I do have a bias towards the visual artists when posting; I hope to be able to use others words more to inspire me in the future, but here is a joint attempt...
Stand up Sina (Day 26 - just gorgeous) and Catherine (Iceland slipping through my thoughts, and allowing me to bring out this picture of twigs growing alongside a waterfall); and a hand-clap to George Sebastian-Coleman (Conversations 3) for the following words of wisdom.
Woman: Routine. Routine kills everything. When you date, the other person is the thing that makes things special. When you marry, they're just part of the everyday.

He will not take a risk to be with me because sparks fade, he says. But, oh, how fragile is his world, their world if it must be protected from the real world? It is spring, he cannot help but send out those tendrils, seeking sweetness and lightness and fun and escape. They look so pretty, so hopeful, I don't want to yank them up and put them on the compost pile, but I know it is easier now than to hew at a thickened trunk. Unless, like me, he is a baobab; hollow insides waiting for a glut of water to ride out the parched seasons.

023. Here be dragons

I was inspired today (again) by Catherine Singer's Icelandic pictures (I have to ration myself or half of my posts would be on Iceland too); and also Barbara Laucius's beach pictures, of broken down driftwood, entitled Beach Worn. Taking Staffa (day 21) into the mix also, along with the eye-shaped curves in Carianne Garside's days 20-22, and admiring the word "basalt", the heaviness and solidity of it, the shiny wet blackness...

  

      Breaking the surface, basalt scales
            drip, dully sheened; sun warming
                  anthracite back. Flex wing muscles,
                        expecting a geological grinding, but
                              silent. Earthbound in the step-off
                                    point between sea and layered airs,
                                          leap to regain fluidity. Somersaults
                                                of pewter, tumbling your buildings.

009. Iceland

Catherine Singer's theme for 100 days is Iceland. How could I resist? Her image, possibly Þingvellir, is winterbound, stark and eerily beautiful. I visited in the summer, when Iceland was a land of light, and the image I chose is of Sólfar (The Sun Voyager, by Jón Gunnar Árnason). The colours echo (foreshadow, if I was not working backwards) the coffee and cream glacier in day 10.

From the Orkneyinga saga (written by an unknown Icelander in the early 13th century) - secondly inspired by Marcus Speh's use of mediaeval images & characters in 100 days and nights


Next morning when it was light they went to look for runagate men among the isles if any had got away;  and each was slain on the spot as he stood.  Then earl Einar took to saying these words:  “I know not what I see in Rinansey, sometimes it lifts itself up, but sometimes it lays itself down, that is either a bird or a man, and we will go to it.”  There they found Halfdan long-leg, and Einar made them carve an eagle on his back with a sword, and cut the ribs all from the backbone, and draw the lungs there out, and gave him to Odin for the victory he had won then Einar sung this:

                  “Man broad-bearded oft is outlawed,
                  Many a one, for stealing sheep;
                  But in isles here I for felling
                  Mighty Harold’s youthful son:
                  Risk hangs o’er me, say the freemen,
                  From the king so courage-full,
                  Harold’s shield I’ve hewn a hole in,
                  None can call that dint in doubt.”

002. Reverse

I always wanted to go to Iceland, as I mention further on in this blog (since I am working backwards from day 11); and one of the reasons was to see a black sand beach, despite my Dad telling me I could do that in the North East of England when the coal dust washes up onto the shore. Catherine Singer has perfectly captured this in "The Heart is Mine", and started a new longing, for frozen sea...

Back to Black - Amy Winehouse
    You went back to what you knew,
    so far removed,
    from all that we went through.
    And I tread a troubled track,
    my odds are stacked,
    I go back to black ..