The Guardian (UK) is abuzz at present with articles on Richard Long, the British sculptor whose “time has come” as one of them says. (You can read three of these articles here, here and here.) Plus there’s a slide-show of his impressive current retrospective at the Tate Britain, which really shows the international standing of this “sleeper” in the world of sculpture.

Seeing all this work online reminded me of how, when I was studying sculpture, I was influenced by this artist, particularly by his early works such as A Line Made By Walking. As Robert Macfarlane says in one of the above Guardian articles:

His best-known early piece is A Line Made by Walking. On a sunlit day in 1967, he caught a train south-west out of Waterloo. When the suburbs gave way to countryside, Long got off the train, and found a field whose grass was starred with daisies. He walked back and forth, until the flattened grass caught the light such that it was “visible as a line”. Then he photographed the line in black and white, and went home.

And here is that photograph:

Richard Long
A Line Made by Walking, 1967

I don’t imagine that Richard Long had in mind the noumenal field when he walked this work – it’s my overlay onto the work that it stands for me as a kind of “ur-work”, a definition of an attitude to art making and a reverence for the underlying ground that supports this attitude. And it has the overlay of a remembered work, the only trace of which is the artifact of the black and white photo above. It’s like the feeling I get when walking into a local gallery in Paddington, and seeing (maybe it’s behind the counter where the minders sit) a small study or drawing by the current artist, setting the theme for the show; and having the feeling that the paintings for sale on the walls are “blow-ups” of that single, energised study – that the sum of the energy in the entire gallery space exactly equals, and is determined by, the energy generated by the single dense study, that ur-work. A good metaphor, for me, of how the noumenal field, the original ur-work, explicates.

On the Field, Part 2 of 4: John Berger
On the Field, Part 1 of 4: Robert Duncan

Things have been a little quiet recently (on the posting front) while I moved from my old Blogger FTP blog to WordPress. I’m still pretty new to WordPress, and a little tired from the effort of moving the old posts and setting up the new blog, but here we go!

Despite the effort I’m pleased I’ve made the move, and am ready for many years of happy blogging in a great environment.

(I notice a few links – between posts – are still not working, due to the differences between Blogger and WordPress permalinks. These I’ll get to, and will repair.)

We’ve been having wet weather and odd winds for the last few days, as we move through one of our local seasons towards the January heat. I say “one of” because having lived in Sydney for more than 20 years I don’t have an experience of four seasons – despite continuing attachments here to the northern hemisphere idea that we have four.

According to Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson, Sydney, in the meteorology of the First Australians, in fact has six seasons. Each is related to the flowering of native plants:

• September to October is Murrai’yunggoray. The red waratah flowers, and temperatures start to rise.
• November to December is Goraymurrai. The hickory wattle flowers. Warm, wet weather and the chance of flooding.
• January to February is Gadalung marool. The wattle flowers are hot and dry. First Australians ate fruit and seeds, as meat would spoil.
• March to May is Banamurrai’yung. The lillipilli (of which we have a beautiful specimen, just outside on the street) has its sour berries. A time of wet weather and cooling temperatures.
• June to July is Tugarah’tuli. The forest red gum flowers. Cold weather, traditional peoples travel to the coast.
• August is Tugarah’gunyamarra. The wattle flowers. Cold and windy. Traditional peoples travel back to the western highlands, following fish upstream.

This is a preamble to reports of allergies amongst friends, and my own conjunctivitis which has this week limited my interest in the computer screen.

Which in turn leads me to this NY Times post on slow blogging, one that’s been linked to now from a few blogs I follow. It’s a good reminder to me to strive for depth rather than frequency, which I intended doing when starting this blog (“Occasional notes on…”). I notice it’s easy to get subtly hooked into frequency however, particularly when the blog becomes a point of contact with like-minded people – something I’ll try to watch, as I remember the “occasional”.

I’m reflecting on the freedom I have to make art in my life (in the widest sense of the idea of art making) – and thinking of Mulrunji Doomadgee, who died within forty minutes of being put in the Palm Island lock-up, for a misdemeanor, in 2004.

The sorry sentencing of Lex Wotton (charged with inciting a subsequent riot) is the latest in this tale, told again on the ABC radio program The sentencing of Lex Wotton this morning.

Here’s Andrew Boe (Queensland criminal lawyer), towards the end of this program, his words carrying the weight of a man impassioned in his truth-telling:

…where in the history of this matter, has there been any acknowledgement of those responsibilities? Where has there been an appreciation that this man should never have been arrested for swearing on the street? Never been placed into custody. Should not have been left in a situation where there was manhandling by one police officer in a fashion that that sort of injury should occur. Where has there been an acceptance that leaving him on that cement floor for three hours to die in excruciating pain was acceptable? Where has there been an embracement of the conditions that these watch houses are set up in where the monitor video that was capturing this was not being heard by the Senior Sergeant and other people shortly just outside? Where has there been an acceptance that the investigation with all its shortcomings, and they’ve been so clearly set out in CMC [Queensland's Crime and Misconduct Commission] reports, where has there been an appreciation that what we did here was very wrong, and how we went about examining it was wrong, and flawed.

From Irvin Yalom’s Staring at the Sun:

One of Nietzsche’s favorite phrases is amor fati (love your fate): in other words, create the fate that you can love.

Contact details:
I practice psychotherapy in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs. You can contact me regarding psychotherapy on 0422 975 179. Alternatively, you can email me on ron.dowd.therapy@gmail.com.

Practice:
I work with individuals and with couples.

Sometimes in couples therapy it’s good to have a couple working as joint therapists. I also work this way, in conjunction with my wife Amanda Gruhn (Karima), who is also a qualified Gestalt psychotherapist.

Background:
I’m qualified in Gestalt psychotherapy and am a Member of GANZ (Gestalt Australia and New Zealand). I studied at two schools in Sydney, Sydney Gestalt Institute and Gestalt Practitioners Training Sydney.

I’ve practised visual art making for the past 16 years. I’ve also had an interest in Jungian psychology for more than 20 years, and have called upon this in my art practice. My first profession was in computing, and I still also work as a business analyst.

Recently I’ve become more interested in language and poetry, and have for the past five years returned to writing poetry. (I first started writing when I was young.) I’m also influenced in my psychotherapeutic work by the Conversational Model and by current writings on intersubjectivity.

I strongly subscribe to the dictum that in psychotherapy “it’s the relationship that heals”.

Qualifications:
Bachelor Engineering (Hons), Master Engineering, Bachelor Fine Arts,
MA (Hons) (thesis), Advanced Dip Gestalt Therapy (GPTS), Member GANZ

Welcome to my new blog. It replaces the old www.rondowd.com, which was mainly a gallery of my visual art making since 1993.

All my art work from 1993 until 2006 is still on-line here.

In this new blog I would like to publish the occasional comment on psychotherapy, art making, poetry, and the cross-overs between them, as I encounter them in my day-to-day work.

I would also like to publish some of my own poems and linocuts.