thanksgiving

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we have thought, we become.
~ Buddha

It is Thanksgiving today in Canada. It is the first time that I shall be experiencing it. In America, Thanksgiving is huge! It is possibly the most important holiday of the year.
I woke up this morning for the second time. I was up at three and wondering whether to stay awake and do some work that was prodding me to stay up. What it was was a group of ideas based on going to Art Gallery of Ontario yesterday. I found myself there because i wanted to see the work of my Indian friend. Instead, I saw the works of other contemporary Indian artists, called 'Hungry God." the artists were, Atul Dodiya, Bharti Kher and Subodh Gupta. The works explored the concerns of modern India and its post-colonial, post-patition identity. The themes explored in 'Hungry God,' reflect the artists' broad ideas concerning nationalism. global identity and history revisited, while grounded in experiences and icons that are uniquely Indian.
(All of that is quoted directly from the exhibition catalogue)
What that show did for me, was (as always with such things) make me look at Caribbean art and wonder about the sort of imagery that would set an artist from Trinidad and Tobago apart from someone from somewhere else.
So this morning my mind was racing and the work that I saw in my minds' eye was just itching to get out. All large convases of richly coloured works that focused on one or two colours came to me. A whole canvas blocked out at top and base with the image looking squeezed in the central frame of red costumes, the Scarlet Ibis, pomeracs, one dollar bills saying Trinidad and Tobago and Baliziers flowers. I saw this money motif play out again and again because our money is colourful, so there was a green canvas, a grey canvas, a purple canvas and a blue canvas. The works reminded me of Rochenberg, that 1960's pop artist who works huge and paints iconic American imagery.
I also saw imbedded sections of film and embroidery in the work. As my mind wondered, I asked myself, where would I be able to do these huge works? naturally the work was being done in a studio space.
The whole thing was rather exciting. I also saw myself working from small images that were collages, and I was literally blowing them up larger than life and also shaping the canvases to look like huge exotic flowers. I also had a collection of works that were 'U' shaped canvases, canvases that were joined so that you could walk into them and walk from left to right, then walk outside of them and walk from right to left. Those focused on repitition and were based on perceptions of all races and class structures in Trinidad and Tobago. So you saw Caucasian Trini's down de islands and the vendor in the corner and prices for meat and the Syrian trader. Those were in colour and black and white.
I really enjoyed looking at these ideas as they unfolded in my mind.

Very little is needed to make a happy life: It is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
~ Marcus Aurelius