A Kind of Tenderness

My most recent paintings are once again based on scenes from my morning walk up Driver Road.

Below are two photos that served as source material for the paintings above:

Pessoa wrote:

Peace at last. All that was dross and residue vanishes from my soul as if it had never been. I’m alone and calm. It’s like the moment when I could theoretically convert to a religion. But although I’m no longer attracted to anything down here, I’m also not attracted to anything up above. I feel free, as if I’d ceased to exist and were conscious of that fact.

Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics) 

In my back studio I often meditate as the New Zealand winter afternoon turns stormily into dusk then dark. Dark inside – pitch black if not for the small  candle and gas heater spreading warm yellow amidst the shadows. Outside rough jerking wind-sound and trucks on River Road.

But inside on the out breath all clarifies into a deep peace the colour of a winter sky in a painting out of Africa. Thoughts still move like northern lights across the mind screen.  Breathing deep into the hip sockets, the pelvic bowl expands – becomes a Milky Way. Another out-breath….and then the bell.

Pessoa continues:

Peace, yes, peace. A great calm, gentle like something superfluous, descends on me to the depths of my being. The pages I read, the tasks I complete, the motions and vicissitudes of life – all has become for me a faint penumbra, a scarcely visible halo circling something tranquil that I can’t identify. The exertion in which I’ve sometimes forgotten my soul, and the contemplation in which I’ve sometimes forgotten all action – both come back to me as a kind of tenderness without emotion, a paltry, empty compassion.

Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics) 

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