My Scissors

Henri Matisse, Blue Nude, paper cut out, 1952. Musée Henri Matisse.

Much of the beauty

that arises in art

comes from the struggle

an artist wages with

his limited medium.

-Henry Matisse

Like a stray cat, frustration followed me through the evening and into the morning. Yesterday's recordings were the first results which upset me due in part to the simple fact that my focus on sound reconstructed past memories of a place and atmosphere I once thought I understood.

I realized that I have no 'frame of reference' such as the one a photographer may have. There is no landscape, there is no portrait. I cannot create a picturesque focus on the Champs Élysées, and crop out the construction to the left of the street. It's no wonder so many people walk with ipod in hand. My sound here is not uni-directional. It encompasses a spherical space about the body that encounters both the good, the bad, and the ugly. This recording is a positive step towards finding intelligible evidence that can help enlarge my understandings of atmosphere and environment.

I will save the conclusion for this blog for the actual exhibition. However for those of you who cannot wait, a hint. There is a place in Paris where sound performs in the way a band-aid would perform on a cancer patient. I may be wrong, so I will have to return again and again to this place until I can have concrete evidence. What I can conclude with is this:

I am finally unlearning how to see.

One thing that brings me comfort on this subject matter is a man who continues to inspire me. For those of you who are not yet familiar with his story, during his last few years as an artist, Matisse suffered from severe arthritis and it was painful for him to hold a paintbrush. In order to combat this, he began his paper cut series where the scissors formed the lines he could not make with a brush. It enabled him to produce some of his best works. I have to continually remind myself that there is an untapped potential here with the study in Paris...I just need to find my scissors.