I believe that the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy … and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of nature herself.

W.B. Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil

Philippa Blair, Tell me your story … Conquistadore? Sept. 2022 Acrylic, oil, mix media 60″ x 100″

“I can’t stop working”  Philippa writes to me. Philippa has reached a peak of solitude in her life. She is diving through a space from which the future has been banned. She delves into it, painstakingly inquiring the infinite mutation of her feelings. Is it so important not to see a future? I can touch a similar ghost around myself, we are the same age, Philippa and myself. A long life behind us. Long enough to dim obsessions of personal separate journeys shrunk into a name. For how long? Does it matter? We are single energies trying to break through the stillness, the stiffness of a world, our world and yours, dear readers, that Philippa calls Headland, or Eyeland. Everything visible, clear edges, tormenting need of evaluations, fast messages, reassuring. About what? The myriad computations covering with layers of numbers the vast surface of illusions sometimes clogged in a name, democracy for instance, as if organizing, making easy and functional multiple moments of collective living, would save the earth from suffocating under the constant and uncontrolled power of the human HEADS. INSANITY. ABSENCE OF VISION. GREEDINESS.

Philippa Blair, Headlands 2022

Philippa, your Headlands reveal our reality. They open up the Euclidean order and bring back the biological chaos that stirs your need of painting without resting, avoiding  stopping the living flow before the body machine crumbles. The neat packages of life around us disappear. 

“What in reality remains found together like a molten drop is here dissolved, untangled, interwoven— made divine, made human”. (Robert Musil, Precision and the Soul) 

I was so happy savoring Musil’s words of a hundred years ago, words as sharp as knives: artists can set their work free from conventions, from mental habits that had congealed their inner power to conquer what never stops changing, and escapes the high res of thoughts. This what I retained and transformed for sure, a hundred years after. 

Philippa Blair, “Cambiare”(to change) 60″ x100″ sept 2022 Oil, acrylic, tapes, fabric, collage

In each of us lies a spring of emotions, ideas and will, a realm of affinities and resonances not to be defined nor contained. It is so close to your father’s microbiology. Our molecules at work with all the possible nuances and irregular burst of fountains like the erupting volcano we follow every morning from the Big Island of Hawaii. Natural history in us, hidden and magical. We feel it, do not see it. But something gushes out on your canvases, spreads on your papers. Not memory, not really. Images seem to come out from a mental sensation of vagueness, uncertainty, intangible wounds, figures incapable of taking only one shape, escaping, avoiding the prison of forms, or the tricky clarity of words. 

That’s why I must stop. Your paintings refuse description, they must be felt. 

Philippa Blair, Counter-flow March 2019 acrylic/oil/camvas 60 x 80 inches

Photos: Kallan MacLeod

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Robert Musil, Precision and Soul, Edited and Translated by Burton Pike and David S. Luft, The University of Chicago Press, 1990

J.D. Blair Microbiologist, Micro-organisms and Human Affairs, Canterbury Agricultural College Publication,  Christchurch, New Zealand, 1948.