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Life, Works and Synesthesia

THE WATCHER

Kategori: Synesthesia

Textured Abstracts are what I enjoy painting the most. Every time, the paint teaches me something new. I apply different temperatures to a latex paint base and then I watch it do whatever it wants. It is only then that I begin working on it, sometimes I have a previously sketched piece, however most of the time, I listen and I paint accordingly. This abstracts happen when I am at my happiest. 
 

BETTY DAVIS

Kategori: Cubed Tuesdays

Here is one of my old time favourite ladies. For her intelligence, for her attitude, for her music, for her musing, for her drive, for her beauty, for being banned, for staying clear from drug habits, for still being alive, for not apologising for challenging people, for introducing Hendrix and Sly Stone to Miles Davis. The Absolute Queen of Funk.
 
 
For reasons I can not explain Funk music has a lot of black and white when it processes through my head. Drums and most beats turn my background black and a slap bass with a wah pedal makes anything a bright shade of white, which melts into voices perfectly. It is far from simple though, the complexity and syncopation of the beats folds patterns upon themselves, twisting and spiralling and merging with the bass and the singing (most of rich, quality voices are a sharp white, and create vivid shapes).
 
This is how I trip out any given day. 
  

Simon Rouby's Caltrans Show

Kategori: Bondays Curiosities

As it happens, I have very talented friends. Introducing Monsieur Rouby and one of his projects, which has been going on for the last 5 years. Constant traveller that he is, he decided to draw a parallel to the abstract expressionism of the crisp lines delineating our daily motions. The road strippers at Caltrans cover more mileage than any of us will ever get to paint, they follow complex guidelines and keep us all driving as safe as we are capable of. Simon shadowed them and filmed them at work also enabling them to run their trucks through canvasses. There are real people behind every single line that you drive by, every inch, every corner your turn, every yield you make, they are watching out for you. It's mundane, it is beautiful, it is a quiet map of our cities infrastructure.
 
The show is up at the Caltrans HQ in dtLA until the end of September 2012. Here are some snaps from the opening, which included a short film by Rouby and audio designed by Sage Lewis. 
 
 
Downtown LA was a hub of excitement Thursday night. Add an Art Walk to an Occupy Wall Street protest and you get the LAPD being fuller than their usual selves. As we were happily chalking away early in the afternoon (advertising for the show and handing out leaflets) we got detained and lectured on the 1st amendment. We were held behind our own Yellow Line and had to wait on the Sergeant to come and establish whether we were as 'dangerous' as the 'Occupy mob'. Chalking the pavement was illegal (on that specific Thursday night). It must be nice, to be able to make up rules as it suits, especially if you can justify the unnecessary violence and chaos inflicted throughout the night. 
 
Interviewed by Drew Tewksbury here.
 

FEAR THE POET - Vignette

Kategori: Poetic Sundays

Here comes Sunday. Instead of leaving the week with one of my poems I thought I would introduce my ways of poetry with a vignette. My words are uncomplicated and automatic. Short stories and poems mainly, 20 years later I have compiled around 200 pages of poems in a book titled 'Fear the Poet', which will be available soon.
These are my daily charms. Verses from Neruda seem to always sneak through my daily crevices. There are a couple of bracelets, one given to me by my family a few yules ago, made with Mauritanian stone beads, which I had as a necklace I never took off as a kid. What I love about those is that no matter how (if) you crack them, the inside follows the outside pattern throughout. It's not just little ripples, it's bright coloured full circles, stars, rhomboids and dots and parallel lines, all perfectly made by nature, which sort of explains how I see inside my head. The other bracelet was given to me by a friend of mine I very much admire, the brains behind Soze Gallery in dtLA, the bracelet is by Onyx and Chains and everytime I glance over to check my non existing watch, it reminds me that it is 'Time to Shine', as her favourite saying goes. A green beetle in my pocket, allegory to the Heart chakra and my link to California. His & Hers 'soulmate' rings and my golden double necklace holding a sparrow, a clock marking 10 minutes to 2 and a feather. The latter for the pagan/native-American beliefs of connection to the skies, the spiritual plane, the sparrow as a homage to the first poet (Gustavo Adolfo Becquer) that got through to me (at 13)) and saved me from 'undying love'. The poem rang true because I could see sparrows out of my bedroom window and his opening line referred to how they would return year after year. Glad I was only a teenager for a couple of months. And finally, the clock. It points exactly my time of birth, which was whole 5 days later than scheduled.
And down the rabbit hole and forevermore, 'I shall be too late!' 
 

FIGURED ANGLES - Sæglópur

Kategori: Figured Saturdays

This is something that I had been for so long reluctant to try. My husband, with his BA in Fine Arts (he is a multimedia composer) had the wonderful idea of complicating my life by challenging me to mix all of my abilities into one work. Textured, somewhat figurative and angular, inked and painted and pasted about, sound based too. Oh! And it also had to tell a story. Without words. Well give the man a cookie. 
 
'Self-Portrait, (part of) Sæglópur in the background'
 

Room details

Kategori: Fridays Decor

Since I can remember I have been wishing upon my own habitat to do whatever I want to the space. It became a bit of an obssession after I began serial renting attending university and working in a foreign country. Tired of renting, finally at 34 we managed to get a place of our own in the low Mojave Desert, CA. London's property was impossible to own and Los Angeles was getting hectic and felt unsafe, the sun was not making it shine anymore, so here we are, out in the desert, Joshua Tree National Park up the road and Mid Century Modern gems round the corner. 
 
Needless to say we are quickly running out of wall space but it is in constant turnaround. Like this blog, our home is as black and white as possible, although both our studios self drenched in a colourful chaos without consult.  
                    
    
 
 
Until we can afford updating doors, I spray-painted the scary golden doorknobs Montana Black and made an angular shape around them. It will have to do for the years being.     
 

Into the Gramophone

Kategori: Synesthesia

These are my favourite pastime, it has always been.
 
Since I can remember, I sketched my family based on colours and textures, unknown to me that I was impersonating their voices on paper. They all thought my notebooks were a hot mess until my nan started recognising patterns (same people in different pages). I believe my synesthesia comes from that side of my family, her sister apparently had similar (chaotic) notebooks but at the beginning of the century nobody had paid much attention, nowadays they probe you through childhood to diagnose not-crazy, just funky-wired.
 
While everybody in preschool was having a go at stick figures, I would argue that the yellow triangular lines and scratched paper folds were clearly my mom, but a bubble head and 5 sticks had nothing to do with her. Consequently my teacher used to display my 'abstract' works as how-not-to-draw stick figures. Fun times.
 
I still wonder what part of a stick figure is not an abstraction.
 
 
Details from 'Into the Gramophone' Series © BB Nielsen 2008 
(The original artwork is not in B&W)
                                 

Dance, Dance, Dance

Kategori: Cubed Tuesdays

Hello Tuesday. This is how I used to draw as a kid. I almost lost the angles, trying the photorealism that my school was so fond of. There was not much room for creativity, anything that did not portray the ultimate likeness to real life was not even considered a drawing. I got in neverending trouble for drawing however I wanted. I am still in love with angles, maybe because they line up real life, this way of drawing is still my favourite, I guess I am still 5 and a half. 
 
Photorealistic drawing requires specific skills, mainly extraordinary observation and a very steady hand, but it does not make for a better quality drawing.
I believe everybody can draw, if only they dare to sketch up their realities however they want to perceive them instead of trying a classic way to replicate how daily light hits.
 
Hey! Teacher! Leave the kids alone!
 
                   ''Dance, Dance. Dance' © BB Nielsen 2011
 
 

Eraserhead

Kategori: Bondays Curiosities

Today is Bonday.
 
On Bondays I try my best to slack off from actually doing any work. As a high five to myself for all the 8 am meetings I had to endure throughout my twenties. 
I am watching Eraserhead (not a first), amazed at the quality of work happening while I had not even learned to suck my thumb... Lots of catching up to do.
Black and white movies are pretty much the ones I enjoy watcing the most, it is not because they are vintage, or have a nostalgia to them, less over produced, analog sound or more compelling stories, it is because my colourful add ons travel through a black and white field of images without feeling invasive. When there is too much colour around me I feel crowded. Black and white rooms, films and book pages are the perfect background for a sound attack. 
 
It's 46C/115F outside and I am not brave enough to walk across my patio to open my studio, so here is to me and Mr. Lynch. Love him or hate him, Eraserhead is one in a million, disturbing in so many levels that it would destroy any future perfect nightmares one may have but in some way, so spiritual. Hands down fascinating and gross in equal meassures. 
 
 

Heyla

Kategori: First Post

After many years of fighting social networking and trying to keep up with my own website, I find myself wanting to have a more direct dialogue with anyone interested. I paint, I write poetry, I laugh too much.
 
Contrary to popular belief, people who are dedicated to Art (of any kind) work constantly. There are no days off, no logging out at 5. Something always triggers a frantic search for anything to make a note to self, be it mid-morning coffee or mid cloud bursting.
 
My brain suffers from colour excess (audio-video synesthesia), hence this my virtual home will stay as black and white as my desert home. You may also notice that every post has a day-of-the-week topic. I am not that scheduled in real life, I work on different things any given day, however setting the publishings to a weekly routine allows me more flexibility.
 
My reasons for this blog don't have much of an ego foundation, but instead, a need to show my appreciation and eternal gratitude to the universal forces that allow me to make something everyday. 
 
Talk to me, comment and ask me anything, teach me something and I will try and cruise you through my life as a synesthete. 
 
Thank you for Free-play.
 
Bon x