Black and Blue Meditation

The moving image piece Black and Blue features a sequence of performances  and  is a meditation piece upon Creation and destruction and self isolation.

I had recently seen a piece by Wally Hendrick called the War Room a small room of Black Canvas’s painted in denunciation of the Vietnam and Gulf War (“A Solitary manifestation of Solidarity”) and Tuol Sleng a very disturbing  place I visited when in Cambodia which had made a huge impression on me. A crude bessablock structure built within a 1960’s school (strangely similar to my own). It was used by the Khemer Rouge regime as a place of execution and torture. The place seemed a cruel embodiment of the destruction of humanity.

I started the piece of  meditation, consciously making myself present in the space through the use of breathing excursuses “KumNye” ( a practice I have kept up over many years), and then using my body as a guide for the different marks and gestures I make with Paint.

The Wallace Stevens poem “The Man with The Blue Guitar” describing the famous Pablo Picasso painting is also a meditation on the nature of Art, Performance and the Imagination.

This is read here by the actor/filmaker Stuart Alexander.