peter morrison 2011

Today is Russell Hoban's 86th birthday, to celebrate, have a quote from the first novel of his that I ever read:

Empty Spaces

‘A sense of loss pervades the paintings of Peter Diggs,’ wrote the critic Cecil Berkeley about my last show at the Fanshawe Gallery. ‘His palette is muted his compositions unsettling. The figures in his pictures seem about to depart, and there are odd empty spaces that make the viewer wonder who or what is coming.’

But that’s life, isn’t it? And those of us who think about the empty spaces tend to paint pictures, write books or compose music. There are many talented people who never will become painters, writers, or composers; the talent is in them but not the empty spaces where art happens.

- from Amaryllis Night and Day

Posted to Tumblr and LiveJournal

I think this quote is particularly significant [on my Tumblr art blog] - about the empty spaces that drive creativity.

The dream stayed with me so strongly that I could play it back like a videotape: the bus stop in the summer dusk, the street lamps lit against a sky still light - that time of day that always catches at my heart.

There was the sign that said BALSAMIC; the letters were sharp and clear; they riffled like rail departures but the name stayed the same. There were those shaky-looking buildings and the bust stop and there she waited, the thin woman with the straw-coloured hair, blue eyes, and pale face, unknown but seeming to look at me round the edges of my memory. Sleeping or waking, I’d never seen her before.

Again and again she gestured with her clenched fist and said “Yes!” silently. She wanted me to follow her. Why? Here came the bus: FINSEY-OBAY, yellow, pink and orange rice paper and bamboo lit from within - like a Japanese lantern. Such a light against that not-yet-dark sky! Again she looked at me as she boarded the bus and I felt the thrill of terror as stepped back. And again the sense of loss. What did she want? How could I find her again?

She was gone; I was left behind in the present moment, which not a simple finite thing measured by the clock; it’s a palimpsest of all the present moments before it, their images, music, words and whispers rising up through the layered years from the oldest present moment to the newest; and in those moments live, remembered or forgotten, sleeps and wakings and dreams.

- from Amaryllis Night and Day

Posted to Tumblr

While this is from the third chapter, it recaps the dream that occurs in the first chapter, it is this image which caught my attention, this image being the reason I bought this book in the first place. I’d love to see that image come to life, the bamboo bus in its yellow, pink and orange rice paper.