Samia Halaby: drawing with the principles of nature
I am watching Samia Halaby on YouTube. The video is posted by Tate. The artist is talking about her abstract paintings and says:
I had taken a very strong step into abstraction by just questioning. The difference for me between abstraction and perspective is that I'm using the principles of nature rather than the appearance of nature from one instant in time.
I am noticing this artist right now and also realizing that she is the latest in a long string of noticings that have been happening to me recently.
I’ve been seeking what it was that Nabokov and Woolf saw shimmering beyond the edge of their perception. I’ve gained a better understanding of this as through Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. I’ve seen a different perspective from McKenna and psychedelics. I’m reading about Zen and Japanese Shintoism, discussing it every now and then with Barış and revisiting my own notes on consciousness.
The culmination of all this happened while watching Wim Wenders’s movie Perfect Days. Wenders captures beautiful scenes that seem to emerge from nowhere. He uses the ritual of reading as a backdrop to the day, accompanied by music, food, work, pauses, interaction with other people, nature, design, and more. I am spellbound by the film and see many similarities with my own routine. Every morning I look out the window, anticipating the color of the morning sun. I do my yoga routine for physical fitness. These days I read only the bare minimum because of work on Wordmark, but enough to keep a light bright enough to illuminate things from a different angle in my day.
And the days are better with a book I found in the flea market by a Japanese artist who illustrates the mechanical essence of smoke and flowers, followed by watching Samia Halaby at night talk about drawing with the principles of nature rather than its appearance. In between, I read The Sand Wolf to the kids, where it explains that it was the elements before becoming the sandwolf. And I think to myself that Åsa Lind must have been seeing it—the way of the universe. I'll go ahead and claim that What she describes in her books is nothing short of God, or at least consciousness.
This is as much as I can weave right now. It can be something of more value if I come back to this and expand on each of the points. To sum it up, I think I can see more of the Quality in my life now and I think it’s because I am actively searching for it.
