Suspended lion face
Spilling at the centre
Of an unfurnished sky
How still you stand,
And how unaided
Single stalkless flower
You pour unrecompensed.
The eye sees you
Simplified by distance
Into an origin,
Your petalled head of flames
Continuously exploding.
Heat is the echo of your
Gold.
Coined there among
Lonely horizontals
You exist openly.
Our needs hourly
Climb and return like angels.
Unclosing like a hand,
You give for ever.
Philip Larkin
- from High Windows
If I were called inTo construct a religion
I should make use of water.
Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;
My litany would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
-- Philip Larkin
Imagery in offices.........
TR's pipe.....'ceci n'est pas une pipe'
DW's scratched, chalk dusty glasses
The Joan Miro show at Tate Modern finished week. The most memorable and stunning piece is the vast 1968 triptych: Painting on White Background for the Cell of a Recluse
Adrian Searle at the Guardian liked it too: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/apr/11/joan-miro-tate-modern
It needs to be seen to be appreciated. It is a world line, a strange trajectory, a life lived, a concise and beautiful statement.
Acrylic on canvas
267,8 x 352 cm
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
From this image and others in this series, I anticipated that Piet Mondrian was contemplating a deeper understanding of what makes up the world........ I discovered his words on the subject today.
'For there are 'made' laws, 'discovered' laws, but also laws - a truth for all time. These are more or less hidden in the reality which surround us and do not change. Not only science but art also, shows us that reality, at first incomprehensible, gradually reveals itself by the mutual relations that are inherent in things'.
I asked myself - which books have had the most use in Imperial College's physics library? Judging the books by their covers, Richard Feynman's lectures are nominees.
