The intelligent poor individual was a much finer observer than the intelligent rich one. The poor individual looks around him at every step, listens suspiciously to every word he hears from the people he meets; thus, every step he takes presents a problem, a task, for his thoughts and feelings. He is alert and sensitive, he is experienced, his soul has been burned…
Knut Hamsun, Hunger
Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.
James Joyce, Ulysses
Mogwai – Superheroes of BMX
Following on from previous posts (here and here), this was the third painting in the series of works inspired by the songs of Bill Callahan. ‘Santa Maria’ is actually a cover version but, as with all the songs he covers, Bill makes it his own. This painting has already sold but others in the series are stil available. Watch for further posts in this series over the next few weeks.
Bill Callahan – Santa Maria (Versus cover)
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.
W. Somerset Magham, Of Human Bondage
Suede – The Drowners
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
I gave this painting to George Shaw last year. I did not expect one but George generously replied with signed copies of his books and a note detailing the irony of this painting’s title with the news that his local pub had just shut down. “We are being swept into the dusty corners,” he wrote, and he’s not wrong.
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