WINDOWS
View from a window: outside looking in, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 180 cm, 2024
Gleaning is the ancient practice of picking up food left behind. I am reminded of ‘The Gleaners’, a 19th century painting by Millet. Women collecting waste. I look at the women in the painting and I relate to their back breaking posture. Bent over, they stretch searching with one arm to collect the leftover crops. Each one carries a large load in the sun surrounded by further fields to comb. To glean: once a legally enforced right of the poor to have at it at the scraps, no questions asked.
I watch Agnes Varda’s ‘The Gleaners and I’. It looks like VHS tape circa 2000. She shows me that the modern-day gleaner is a dumpster diver Goya painting, confined to bins in a city full of desperate people.
What happened to the rights of the poor to th.. never mind. We are tough. A familial tradition passed down over generations. Honed the art of working with scraps given and or found. Appearing small but big inside. One arm behind our backs reaching, good and bad. One eye open while sleeping, thinking which way nicotine will decide to murder me and Socrates supposedly saying that ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’. & I agree.
I watch Agnes Varda’s ‘The Gleaners and I’. It looks like VHS tape circa 2000. She shows me that the modern-day gleaner is a dumpster diver Goya painting, confined to bins in a city full of desperate people.
What happened to the rights of the poor to th.. never mind. We are tough. A familial tradition passed down over generations. Honed the art of working with scraps given and or found. Appearing small but big inside. One arm behind our backs reaching, good and bad. One eye open while sleeping, thinking which way nicotine will decide to murder me and Socrates supposedly saying that ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’. & I agree.