Mozishan

MOZISHAN
2023
20 by 25 cm, acrylic on canvas

[context]

Sviatohirsk

SVIATOHIRSK

2023

18 by 18 in, acrylic on canvas

 Original image: Yurii Kochevenko

[context]

浦上の被昇天 Urakami no Hishouten

ASSUMPTION AT URAKAMI 

November 2023

15 by 30 in, acrylic on canvas

Original image by Takashi Nagai

Detail: Mary

Detail: Signature

Detail: cherub

Detail: title

Detail: St. Paolo Miki

ᒪᒥᕐᓘ?

(February, 2018) Private collection of Gilsie Gilbert Tiwol, Penampang

La Vara de San José, Isaías 7:14

6 November 2017

This is how Jesus Christ came to be born. His mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph; but before they came to live together she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being an upright man and wanting to spare her disgrace, decided to divorce her informally. He had made up his mind to do this when suddenly the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, 'Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son and you must name him Jesus, because he is the one who is to save his people from their sins.' Now all this took place to fulfil what the Lord had spoken through the prophet:

Look! the virgin is with child and will give birth to a son whom they will call Immanuel, a name which means 'God-is-with-us'.

When Joseph woke up he did what the angel of the Lord had told him to do: he took his wife to his home; he had not had intercourse with her when she gave birth to a son; and he named him Jesus. (Matthew 1:18-25)

A Painting for Sakhayana

On Monday, while evening mass had just started, Sakhayana Alekseyeva, a famous actress who lived in Yakutsk, saw a painting which I had published on Instagram. She replied, saying that she loved it, then she shared it for the rest of her fans. It was the best thing that happened all day! I made sure the world knew.

I made the painted version of this picture in particular from Marie's advice, because of that mesmerising and surreal effect from the frost on her eyelashes, and also I needed some outlet to express and exorcise this unlikely, sudden, and stupid infatuation which stirred my emotions into a mush and gave inspiration to all sorts of strange creative ventures.

Back before the sanctuary, I gave a quick thanks to the upstairsman for allowing me even this small and frivolous joy in painting a picture of a beautiful lady, and the indulgence of being noticed for the trouble. I certainly hope this made her day as much as it had made mine. Meanwhile I shall pack up and busy myself with many other things.

 

Sakhayana

Acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cm

  20 March 2016

(It's just a study, really.) 

[Link to Sakhayana's Instagram]
[Drama series "Ыллыктар (Transcr.: Illıktar)" from NVK Sakha]

The Confession of Alessandro Serenelli, 1961

I'm nearly 80 years old. I'm about to depart.

Looking back at my past, I can see that in my early youth, I chose a bad path which led me to ruin myself.

My behavior was influenced by print, mass-media and bad examples which are followed by the majority of young people without even thinking. And I did the same. I was not worried.

There were a lot of generous and devoted people who surrounded me, but I paid no attention to them because a violent force blinded me and pushed me toward a wrong way of life.

When I was 20 years-old, I committed a crime of passion. Now, that memory represents something horrible for me. Maria Goretti, now a Saint, was my good Angel, sent to me through Providence to guide and save me. I still have impressed upon my heart her words of rebuke and of pardon. She prayed for me, she interceded for her murderer. Thirty years of prison followed.

If I had been of age, I would have spent all my life in prison. I accepted to be condemned because it was my own fault.

Little Maria was really my light, my protectress; with her help, I behaved well during the 27 years of prison and tried to live honestly when I was again accepted among the members of society. The Brothers of St. Francis, Capuchins from Marche, welcomed me with angelic charity into their monastery as a brother, not as a servant. I've been living with their community for 24 years, and now I am serenely waiting to witness the vision of God, to hug my loved ones again, and to be next to my Guardian Angel and her dear mother, Assunta.

I hope this letter that I wrote can teach others the happy lesson of avoiding evil and of always following the right path, like little children. I feel that religion with its precepts is not something we can live without, but rather it is the real comfort, the real strength in life and the only safe way in every circumstance, even the most painful ones of life.

Alessandro Serenelli, May 5, 1961

--- original Italian text ---

Sono vecchio di quasi 80 anni, prossimo a chiudere la mia giornata.

Dando uno sguardo al passato, riconosco che nella mia prima giovinezza infilai una strada falsa: la via del male che mi condusse alla rovina. Vedevo attraverso la stampa, gli spettacoli e i cattivi esempi che la maggior parte dei giovani segue quella via, senza darsi pensiero: ed io pure non me ne preoccupai. Persone credenti e praticanti le avevo vicino a me, ma non ci badavo, accecato da una forza bruta che mi sospingeva per una strada cattiva. Consumai a vent’anni il delitto passionale, del quale oggi inorridisco al solo ricordo. Maria Goretti, ora santa, fu l’angelo buono che la Provvidenza aveva messo avanti ai miei passi. Ho impresse ancora nel cuore le sue parole di rimprovero e di perdono. Pregò per me, intercedette per me, suo uccisore.
 
Seguirono trent’anni di prigione. Se non fossi stato minorenne, sarei stato condannato a vita. Accettai la sentenza meritata; rassegnato espiai la mia colpa.

Maria fu veramente la mia luce, la mia Protettrice; col suo aiuto mi diportai bene e cercai di vivere onestamente, quando la società mi riaccettò tra i suoi membri. I figli di San Francesco, i Minori Cappuccini delle Marche, con carità serafica mi hanno accolto fra loro non come un servo, ma come fratello. Con loro vivo dal 1936.
 
Ed ora aspetto sereno il momento di essere ammesso alla visione di Dio, di riabbracciare i miei cari, di essere vicino al mio angelo protettore e alla sua cara mamma, Assunta.

Coloro che leggeranno questa mia lettera vogliano trarre il felice insegnamento di fuggire il male, di seguire il bene, sempre, fin da fanciulli. Pensino che la religione coi suoi precetti non è una cosa di cui si può fare a meno, ma è il vero conforto, la unica via sicura in tutte le circostanze, anche le più dolorose della vita.

Pace e bene!

The Witch-Musician

"Uakti is a mythical musician described by the Tucano people of the Alto Rio Negro region of the Amazon. According to the legend, the creature had holes in his body such that they would produce sound when he ran or the wind blew through him. This music seduced the women of the tribe and so the other men burned and buried his body. The myth holds that out of Uakti's remains grew the palm trees from which the Tukanos' flutes are made. The women of the Tukano Indians are thus not allowed to play flutes."

Taraz / Տարազ

Elvedansen

Shelta

An alternative spelling for the Irish language making way for phonological clarity in writing.
Characteristics: One letter per sound. Consonant mutations and broad/narrow consonant distinction marked by diacritics. Inflections change the appearance of a word minimally. Words are written with less letters than in standard Irish spelling.
The name Shelta is stolen from the name of the language spoken among Irish Tinkers (nomadic people), to suggest its nature as something akin to but not exactly Irish-y. Sorry, tinker people.

I. Consonant mutations

Table 1. Basic consonant rewriting rules

II. Broadness

A broad consonant is adjacent to one, or flanked between two broad vowels: a, o or u

A narrow consonant is adjacent to or flanked between two narrow vowels: i or e.

At times a flanking vowel is written not to be pronounced, but to indicate whether the consonant is pronounced in its broad (velarised) or narrow (palatalised) form. Since in Shelta narrow consonants are indicated with a dot below, these flanking vowels are no longer necessary and are not written.

Figure 1. Eliminating silent flanking vowels

To determine whether a vowel is pronounced, it would be necessary to use an audio guide or to have a native speaker read out a passage (which is why all my experiment passages are song lyrics).

The vowel "ao", which is pronounced something like a vague "eh", is rewritten as "y" in Shelta. It is a broad vowel.

Figure 1a. The vowel ao

III. The letter F

The letter F in Irish is only occasionally pronounced. It is usually absorbed into a preceding consonant in the middle of a word. When this happens, the preceding consonant is written with a circumflex and the f is dropped. An exception is with the cluster "bhF", which is an eclipsed F (see Table 1).

Figure 2. Dropping the silent f

IV. Diphthongs

There are places where a lenited consonant (bh, dh, gh, or mh) serve as an approximant or only to lengthen a vowel. Consequently, they lose their consonant status in Shelta spelling and is absorbed into the vowel as a diacritic indicating the identity of the absorbed consonant:

Figure 3. Contracting diphthongs

a. The Lord's Prayer in Shelta Irish 

Abstract and Postmodern Art

This came up on the front page of ST a while back:


This is bad. It seems that the word "abstract" has been stripped of its original meaning and used as an sweeping term for modern art. Maybe I haven't been to any art conventions lately, but I have hardly seen any piece in the Singapore Biennales which I can call "abstract" with a clear conscience and a straight face.

Most of the works, however, can be labeled as "postmodern". Now this is a word which can be abused much any way you like, because not even artists can agree on what it is really about. Allow me to make clear this distinction between "abstract" and "postmodern":


Abstract Art
1. MONDRIAN Piet: Still Life with Gingerpot I - Cubist
2. Ibid.: Still Life with Gingerpot II - Simplified (both 1912)

These pieces are very easy to understand. Basically, they are still-life drawings of kitchenware drawn in a very interestingly sloppy manner. This shift of styles towards ingenious sloppiness or simpler form is what we call Abstraction.


Postmodern Art
3. ČERNÝ David: Mimi Kampa (2000)

Postmodern art happens when the artist hates you.

Eyjafjallajökull

Eyjafjallajökull / signed 28 May 2010
Original picture by unknown

Khanty Reindeer Sled

Khanty Reindeer Sled / signed 14 May 2010
Original picture by Scott S. Warren - [link to article]

Skálholtdómkirkja

Skálholt Cathedral

Acrylic on Canvas / 29 April 2010

Hagia Sophia

Hagia Sophia [detail] / acrylic on canvas / 2 March 2010 (view whole painting)
The Wisdom of God cries aloud,
The Lord created me when his purpose first unfolded,
before the oldest of his works.
From everlasting I was firmly set,
from the beginning, before earth came into being.
The deep was not, when I was born,
there were no springs to gush with water.
Before the mountains were settled,
before the hills, I came to birth;
before he made the earth, the countryside,
or the first grains of the world's dust.

When he fixed the heavens firm, I was there,
when he drew a ring on the surface of the deep,
when he thickened the clouds above,
when he fixed fast the springs of the deep,
when he assigned the sea its boundaries
and the waters will not invade the shore --
when he laid down the foundations of the earth,
I was by his side, a master craftsman,
delighting him day after day,
ever at play in his presence,
at play everywhere in his world,
delighting to be with the sons of men.

-- Proverbs 8:22-31

Konungadöttrarna

I had wanted to paint something based on the song for a long time:

The King's Daughters
Acrylic on canvas
23 February 2010
Konungadöttrarna | The King's Daughters
artist: Gjallarhorn (Finland)
Swedish with translation

Där kommo två jungfrur på konungens gård
-Två rosor och adeliga blomma
de voro bortrövda alltsen dom var små
-Från Engeland äre vi komne
Two Maidens came walking across the Kings yard
-Two roses, two noble flowers
they were stolen away as they were young
-From Engeland we have come
Och jungfruna inför drottningen står
och höves här allt de små tjänstemör i år.
The Maidens stood before the queen
Is there a need here for maidservants this year?

Här haver jag en förgyllande väv
säg, kunnen I väva den väven ned
Here I have a gildering web
Say now, can you weave this carpet to an end?

Den äldsta hon satte sig i vävestolen ned
den yngsta hon trädde i skaft å i sked
The elder she sat down to loom the web
the younger she threaded with weaver's reed

Det första slag hon på väven vov
där vov hon i himmel, där vov hon i jord
On the first touch on gildering web
she wove in the sky and the earth

Det andra slag hon på väven vov
där vov hon in solen å klara mån
On the second touch on the gildering web
she wove in the sun and the moon

Det tredje slag hon på väven vov
där vov hon syster där vov hon in bror
On the third touch on the gildering web
she wove in her sister and brother

Det fjärde slag hon på väven vov
där vov hon I fader där vov hon in morOn the fourth touch on the gildering web
she wove in their father and mother

Å dronningen framfö dem på golvet stå
å fagrare väv jag väl aldrig såg
The Queen came standing before the web
A carpet this fair I have never seen

Den äldsta skall taga mina nycklar i band
den yngsta skall taga min son allt till manThe older shall be keeper of my keys
the younger shall have my son to wed

Å icke är det seden uti vårt land
att syster skall taga sin broder till man
Oh, it is not the custom in our kingdom
that a sister should wed with her brother

Å det vart glädje I konungen gård
-Två rosor och adeliga blomma
när moder och döttrar de kändes åt
-från trollberget äre vi komne
And there was a joy in the King's hall
-Two roses, two noble flowers
when mother and daughters were rejoined at last
-From the trolls' mountains we have come

Pashley

Just to prove to myself that I can still do it:

Modelled in 3ds MAX 2009 based on a classic bike model from Pashley, Hand Building British Bicycles since 1926.

It's quite a satisfying finish. I shall gloat on it for a moment, and then go on and find a use for it or do something else.

Waking Hours

I: In one of the days preceding was the much-anticipated 16G poke. The needle in use now is much larger than before, resembling an undersized drinking straw. Blood tended to pool around a little more than before, where we practiced on each other. There should have been more mosquitoes consequently also, but the sky rained mercifully upon the camp that afternoon.

The way people reacted to the presence of a needle inside their systems are varied, and pretty interesting to watch. Aaron twisted his face in agony, while Andre did nothing but laugh when I pushed my needle into his vein. When it came to my turn to be practiced upon, Nicholas came to me and talked, which took some attention off that thing in my arm. The conversation went something like: What did you take for the A-Levels. I took Physics, ow, Maths, Art and Computing, ow ow. Hey, you took Computing too. So I did. Is it fun, then. Ow, sorry but it still hurts ow, I wouldn't say that, but it was much more fun in the old days oww I surmise, hey, don't walk off just yet...

II: I'm looking forward to lights-out time everyday, probably because of the studying and stuff taxing noticeably upon the neutrons but probably more due to the greater amount of time available to worry about what time to sleep.

In my first night out, I wandered to the National Library and borrowed a book. Most of the alotted time, however, was spent on public transport and walking. In the end I went back late, and soon everyone in the platoon had gotten wind that I went to the National Library. It seemed to amuse them to no end, the reason to which I may never grasp.

III: The book I borrowed was All the Names by José Saramago, published in Portuguese in 1997 and in English in 2000. It told the story of a Central Registry clerk, Senhor José, whom for no reason went to search for a random woman whose profile he found among his secret collection of famous people's profiles. The woman was found to have commited suicide (for no reason either) while he was carrying out his search, and the Registrar, secretly following Senhor José's every move, came to the decision that the archives of the dead and the living are to be merged.

The prose is delivered in a heavily morose spirit, with conversations written in the format demonstrated in (I.). So far I have not found any deep philosophical meaning into the reading, but I have long believed that such things are for finding out later, possibly in the form of a nightmare, a violent awakening.

IV: IV is our slang for "intravenous", but this is not the section about IV. It is (I.)

Andre is entering the UOB art competition armed with ballpoint pens and chicken rice paper. I had bought canvas the weekend before, but only thought of joining because he mentioned it.

Painting might follow the general lines of what I've done in January, or it might not. The urge to start dabbling with portraiture hasn't gone away.

Saint Brendan and the Whale on Easter

Saint Brendan and the Whale on Easter

60 x 45 cm / Acrylic on canvas

That night, a few monks slept in the boat and the rest slept on the island. Next morning, the crew decided to cook some of the raw meat for the supplies. They lit a fire of the driftwood on the island and to their horror and amazement the island moved. At top speed they scrambled back to the boat, abandoning the burning fire and the pot sitting on it. Brendan held out his hand to help each and every man aboard and he told them to hoist the sail as fast as they could.

They hoisted the sail, it bellied with the wind. But as the boat pulled out from the island, the island seemed the slip away from under the boat. Amazing! Each went in different directions, with the island sailing away much faster than the boat. They watched it for one, two, three miles with the fire still burning on it.

The crew of innocent men was puzzled until Brendan explained to them. They had not been grounded on an island - they had come to rest on the back of a great whale!

-- The Storyteller from Ireland: A Novel, by Frank Delaney
For the two weeks here preceding I have given much thought about finishing this painting I haven't been able to rush before the day I enlisted, and upon hitting home it seemed only right to get it done the following morning. This painting is special.