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Bullshit

yes it’s time to leave this pretty nice platform. It has been a wonderfull 3 year period, but now they started censoring my work. 

In 2019 you can follow my studio dairies at https://twitter.com/GartnerRoos hope to see you there. Love you all.

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The dance

Mixed media collage 15 X 17 cm. Central pannel of the Merlin & Lark tryptich.

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The eye of the Merlin

For my Lark & Merlin triptich I studied again the rich history of depicting the bird eye. If the eye is not done properly, you think you are looking at a dead bird, not at all how I thought of the bright alert Merlin that I wanted to paint.

I usually go back to the most famous bird book in the world, Birds of America, and the amazing 435 hand-colored plates by Freemason John James Audubon… just to see how it’s done, or the work of John Gould, or Charles Tunnicliffe… all male artists by the way. While zigzagging through history this way I hit upon another bird book in the shadow of Audubon’s publication. To promote advanced subscriptions necessary for the production, Audubon exhibited some of his hand-colored illustrations at  the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. At this point my inner alarm bells went off, mirorring my personal life into a magnificient bittersweet history of brilliance and fate. A young woman named  Genevieve Jones, an amateur naturalist/artist and daughter of a country doctor saw Audubon’s artwork on display and decided to undertake the production of a book illustrating the birds nests and eggs that Audubon neglected to include in his work.

Genevieve and her childhood friend, Eliza Jane Shulze, planned to draw each plate on stone for an innovative printing technique called lithography and to hand-color each illustration. The book would be sold by subscription and issued in about 20 parts. Each part, composed of three illustrations with text. The printing started when  twenty subscriptions had been secured. Only one month after the first part of her book was celebrated by ornithologists nationwide, Genevieve was struck by severe Salmonella infection. After three weeks of suffering, she died at the age of thirty-two. Only 15 illustrations for the book were completed at that time. Genieve’s artistic endeavor to produce a work like this trancended the book into a fetizised physical object, with which the family could distract themselves from their grief and into which they could invest their passion and energy. Her mother Virginia Jones would complete the drawing of the lithographic illustrations, artist Josephine Klippart was hired to help Virginia and two local girls where hired as colorists working on this labor of love for seven years. Genevieve’s book was finally completed in 1886. 

But the folio-sized treasure was too expensive for almost anyone to afford, and even though Gennie’s father had spent his entire retirement savings to finance the project, not enough copies of the book were sold to offset the production costs. Virginia became temporarily blind for nearly two years, having strained her eyes so severely to complete the work, it brought the family on the brink of poverty.  They never complained and both felt thankful that they had the resources to see the project through and considered their collective work on the book the most significant accomplishment of their lives. Today fewer than 50 of the proposed 100 copies of Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio are known to exist.

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November machine (Lark & Merlin), 3D model

Mechanical toy, mixed media with mechanism,  30 X 20 X 14 cm.

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I found this podcast by Syb on Air. Céline Mathieu in conversation with artist Rosie Heinrich. Instigator of dialog and an advocate of doubt Rosie Heinrich talked about her work larded with sound fragments. For “We always need heroes”, her ongoing project on deconstructing collective narratives, Rosie has been voice-recording Icelanders’ stories about the 2008 financial crash. In a complicated puzzle, she rearranged cuts and snippets to form a new potential narrative from all these stories.

I was immediately struck by a certain sound and the above words, their rhythm, meaning and the constant undulating sound had a sort of hypnotic force over me. On top of this I saw a clear connection between my November Machine and the statement made in the soundpiece. The notion of how someones history connects with future possibilities, and even how I personally seem to repeat the same things over and over again, living in circles as I do. For a sweet moment everything seemed to rhyme because Lentevreugd is not just a beautiful marsh land in the dunes where I often stroll through, the Dutch name means “spring joy”. I wonder wat could be more appropriate than combining the nostalgia of the November Machine with looking forward to the next spring!

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Novus

Yesterday I adapted the November Machine to make the Skylark moving faster, it’s more balanced now compared to the speed of the Merlin.

The numerical value of Novus in Chaldean Numerology is nine, November was originally the ninth of ten months on the Roman calendar, following October (octo, “eight”) and preceding December (decem, “ten”). Interesting how culture counts the days. In my November Machine I wanted to conserve memories and colors, Vlietlanden, Knardijk, Lange Duinen and not to forget beautiful Lentevreugd. In hindsight are these places somehow connected to raptors and the wild pursuit of their evasive prey. Especially in November, when migrant birds are abundant and lost in these vast open areas. The domain of the Harriers, Buzzards, Peregrines, and Merlins. Considering the scale of the model I thought of the Merlin, just a slightly bigger bird than it’s prey, unaware of the Brittish poet Tom Pickard and his moving poem Lark & Merlin. That came later when I started searching the web. I think I have it all working now and I wil start to finnish up the machine in an attempt to create the un-creatable.

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Too Slow

The hunter and it’s prey. At some point it’s clear that a merlin is faster than a lark. I know that very well, the inevitibility stares us in the face, merlin would go extinct if this was otherwise. The laws of nature leave little room for sentimentality. 

Working on my November Machine there is one thing I did not test beforehand, the coordination between the pace of the various movements involved in the mechanism. The merlin flashes by, so far so good… and the lark must be slower, understandable. The thing is, in my machine the lark moves slower than snail speed. I suspect that it’s way below standards for a proud falcon to feast on a sitting duck, this noble creature needs the challenge, so in the upcoming days I will be reworking my machine.

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Lark & Merlin

she asked about my heart, its evasive flight; but can I trust her with its secrets? and does the merlin, in fast pursuit of its prey, tell the fleeing lark it is enamored of its song? or the singing lark turn tail and fly into the falcon’s talons?

from the poem by Tom Pickard

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Old tricks

The Renaissance architects knew it, English and Frence gardeners perfectioned it Trompe-l'œil (French for "deceive the eye"). To place trees and shrubs with small leafs in the background, clip them more tiny. For the November Machine I used pine needles to suggest far away reeds in contrast with the hefty stalks in the foreground, to prompt a feeling of watching a model with more depth than the 13.5 cm deep interior allows.

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Dramatic movement

It’s a long road back to the origins of mechanical animation. Naturally there where mechanisms all along… smart utilisations to ease heavy labor and to push the mobilisation of mankind. That goes back as far as the Egyptians and maybe even earlier. Personally I’m more interested in the mechanisms solely applied for entertainment and joy. I think that started somewhere during the Renaissance. The mechanical theatre to evoke myths and to lift the spirit. The sweet technical appliances for movement and trickery, when dead matter suddenly seems to start living. Motivated by the urge to let the spectator transcend the limitiations of the personal sphere and maybe just for a second, enter the terra nova of the mind. 

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November days

Collecting reed for the scene. The cloche is about ready, a terrible job, grinding and polishing the polyester, wearing a mask and gloves. I did a nice languistic discovery when I searched for the right word for the cover or bell jar. In Dutch we have the word “stolp” and we also use the French word “cloche”. Probably inspired by the external form “cloche” translates in Dutch as klok or in English: bell. Globally speaking you could say that somehow the notion of time is connected to the word, as if you hear the far away sound of church bells tooling. A good sign because in my cloche I collect all my November days.

Postscript: later on during the project I got rid of the cloche because the piece needed an open space for the birds to perform their dance, the tight encapsulated scene felt not right.

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Romantic Machinery

Away for a while, no internet no phone calls and no daily routine, what a beneficence! In hindsight, reflecting on my art practice I saw more clear now how I could define what I create. Sometimes people ask me, are you painter, film maker, photographer... what kind of things do you make? Normally I start chatting about story telling, because each thing is more or less connected to a narrative or a certain idea and it all ends up in what I call my diaries. I tell them I use various media and materials to archive or express things. All in all a rather vague description of the things that keep me occupied. During that strange superficial half sleep in a train from London to Rotterdam I suddenly found the perfect anwer, in the future I will say: I am the maker of Romantic Machinery! And again I took up the work, a hunting scene in the reeds, golden sunlight, my November Machine is in the making.

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Sa”ir

Mixed media collage in vitrine 38 X 35 X 5 cm front and verso.