Heart sutra

in Chinese

Exploring basing my tracing paper calligraphy on the Heart Sutra, a text I have worked with before visually.

Some versions:

standard script

running script - Zhao Mengfu 13th-14th century





cursive style

Tsai Yulong - contemporary

Adeline Wysong - contemporary

what is a photograph?

Interesting article in new York Times on the 'identity crisis' in photography as the shift continues away from documentary image and chemical process towards the constructed image and digital process.  Photography involves creating with light, an image. . . that seems to be about all that can be agreed at the moment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/arts/design/with-cameras-optional-new-directions-in-photography.html?_r=0

Tess Jaray

Paintings and Drawings 1964-84
Ashmolean

Shapes drawn on a grid (like Bridget Riley); in the final work this has disappeared and become an invisible element but with great importance - the viewer has a subliminal awareness of it, of what ties the whole thing together.
An aesthetic defined by many detailed decisions.
Influence of Islamic architecture - 'the emotive values and properties of space'; 
' the way the decorated surfaces reveal and unite the structure without merely decorating or adding to it.' (TJ)  

Villandry 1966

'Patterning that is more powerful than decoration...' = her explanation of her surfaces.
Her April suite:  cut outs in the the top print reveal areas of intense colour in the print beneath.

The forms refer to objects - a wave, a waterfall - '...but I never come too close.'
Quotes Titus Burckhardt re. Islamic art, that it uses 3 means to convey the unity of experience: geometry, rhythm and light, 'light which is to visible forms what Being is to limited experience'