jorge pardo

antony gormley

soon jin jo

soon jin jo:meditation space

BLUE PAVILLION

During the month of April I received word that two friends,one young and one old,were stricken

with cancer. It made me wild in some way that sought expression, lacking channels elsewhere,

and so I unfurled a painting begun three years before--a draft or a promissory note on

the outdoor work I hope to do eventually. Quite irrationally I needed a large field for my large

anguish.

I worked outdoors, for the good reason that this painting is six feet high and twenty feet long.

It is made from three layers of shadecloth,or black plastic screening. The painting interruptus was

to have been black and white,but all my prayers were to the blue, and I had been writing of

of the blue,and this is why the painting may have seemed to need to become blue.

And so I hung my painting on the clothes line in the strangest state of mind.

Cobalt blue is always the blue of the journey to God for me; I

associate it with Mohammed's Journey into Heaven by Sultan Mohammed,the Safavid

Dynasty-period Persian painter,a touchstone. There is a blue closer to

cerulean the Limbourg brothers use. I struggled for sometime to make these blues emerge

from my humble shade cloth.

The winds and the rains of the variable April weather constantly interrupted this folly of mine,

which I then had to fold up and place in the garage next to the lawnmower.

And the beauty of our old "pecker-fretted"appletrees in bloom was a constant reproof,so

beautiful were they. And indeed,there are times when the beauty of the simplest or most banal

thing seems to mock me.

So large was this composition that I found I had to climb on the roof and stare down

it upon the ground--the clothes line being strung too low to

completely accomodate it--in order to see it whole. And then I had to climb down

in order to modify it. The trick en route was not to forget what I decided to do.Gradually, it began to be an articulately,deeply blue image.

I very seldom lost some sharply felt sense of my friends in the doing of this, but

I must admit that I did not know what I prayed for except that it was for them.

The talented young woman and the talent old one,both dear to me,how can I

ask that they be uniquely comforted and healed? I found myself praying

for everyone--for the whole world-- through the image and memory and the urgency of my personal concern for my friends.

To feel something very strongly is no guarantee. A prayer is no guarantee of aesthetic

merit. The only way I am allowed to discuss this in anyway is if I recognize

this first. And perhaps it is enough to say that there are times when one

prays without knowing to whom one prays or for whom one prays or with

any sure sense in the efficacy or justice of one's prayers,except that this is

part of the equipment.

BLUE MORPHO

At one time I kept a specimen butterfly of the genus morpho in each of my

rooms, the better to study them. It was part of my obsession with blue,

with the comings and goings of that particular color. On the wings of the

blue morpho which I propped in its transparent case against the back-

drop of a window, I could trace the hour of the day from

dawn to noon to evening by the the angle of the daylight shining through the butterfly wing. The blue began

to fade at dawn, the wings growing more and more etched--

six eyes to each wing--the blue retreating like a shadow until

at noon only the tiniest portion of blue remained at the thorax of the butterfly

where the wings joined. This resembled the

pilot-flame of a gas-jet. And then from noon to evening,

the pattern would be incrementally erased as though through the

sifting of blue dust from the bottom of the wing on up, as

the wings were slowly replenished of their blueness.

Only at nightfall were the wings completely blue.

But perhaps it is better to say:this is a blue series in the key of

iridescence,for the morpho's blue is not one blue but

consists of many. The principal contrast is between

that blue which tilts towards green and that blue which tilts

to purple. The secondary colors duel over the primary.

I might describe at length the engraved images

of the blue morpho's underwing without doing them

justice; they would require as much pterolography--or

proper feather placement--as any

pheasant or owl. No trace of this brindled pattern can be seen at night.

Instead the

blue iridescence seems to happen on a ground of black;

now black lines unseen by day appear to be what separate the

duelling notes of blue. The secret of the iridescence, however,

lies in the fact that the scales of color happen in bands

from bottom to top/ also simultaneously

from side to side. We are scanning colors in layers

as it were from north to south and vice versa,

and simultaneously their radial counter- layers

ranging from east to west. The shimmering is due to the fact

that the human eye can not halt on one layer, but instead is in

a constant state of adjustment among many.

The Morpho butterfly family was Nabokov's favorite

of them all, and he was a lepidopterist;in a letter to his son,

Dimitri, who is to cross a part of the Orinoco river by small

'plane, he says to be alert for the migration of the blue morpho:

their wings will look like blue mirrors in flight.