I pulled a big old canvas out of the closet and set it on top of the bookshelves with the koi, putting it on my “to do” list to finish. And standing back, it begins to look a lot like the koi theme in a different form. I started the painting of the winter mountain before I began painting koi. It’s based on a rather famous photograph (don’t tell anyone), and I have worried about the question of copy-right. I’d love to compare it now with its original, but as so often happens, I don’t know where the source photo vanished to.
How odd, though, to be indebted to an anonymous photographer for an image that so neatly anticipates my koi obsession. But it doesn’t end there.
It imitates the forms of another picture, too — one “unrelated” to the koi. In the collage of the child asleep in dreams, a stream defies gravity by rising up like a mountain — and of course, the mountain rises up like a mountain too. These different forms sprawl in much the same ways.
Looking into one’s mind reveals weird metaphors. Even in stealing, I only take my own obsessions back from the hands of others. And somehow in my occasional housekeeping, I manage to unearth these things at apt moments when the mixed metaphors can meet each other in daylight.
I have a well etched fissure in my brain somewhere, drawn by neurons firing. I’m guessing that under closer inspection, it probably looks a bit like one of these pictures!
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