Peter van Straten Art by Peter van Straten
The man on the street
The recent Tsunami in Japan ruined so much for so many, and its timing was bad for this painting, which was started months before the earthquake, and features a metaphorical wave (a socio-political wave to be precise) rather than a physical wave, and I worry that some might view it as the latter. A journalist doing a piece on a previous show once teased me about how I try to control the way people view my pictures – something I hadn’t been aware of at all until it was pointed out, and here it raises its head again. It is as if I am only intersted in illuminating very specific moments of understanding, and even the slightest shift in focus (like bumping a camera on a tripod) could render the image meaningless.
This is also a painting about silence: not only the silence (inner and outer) that follows disaster, but also the simplicity of clutter stripped away. Even amidst my financial tooth gnashing of 2009 I was grateful for the reminder of vulnerability and simplicity, lessons forgotten in a flash as the next wave washed over us – the wave of business as usual. But how can it be otherwise? To dare, to grow we have to forget! And so the little yin whale and the little yang whale chase each other’s tails around, forever.
May 31, 2011 | 1 Comment » | Share: 
Red line with soil and coal
Over the years, watching the way different people respond to images has convinced me that paintings are no more than elaborately decorated mirrors.
In this painting little Luke Pascoe has created a monumental Artistic Intervention in his mother’s sitting room, and we are privileged to peer over her shoulder at the moment she discovers this. Is she enlightened enough to appreciate the profundity, or will the next five minutes be by far the most traumatic of little Luke’s life? His fate, dear viewer, is in your mind.
May 31, 2011 | 5 Comments » | Share:
Euler’s Formula
As a very young adult I lived in relative poverty – but very real squalor – in a communal house at the bottom of Alma Rd, Rosebank. We were a one-minute stagger from Alma Supply Store where we would buy our bread and beedies. The café was closed by tragedy, and these days the Alma Supply Store hosts live music at night. One evening while watching the Mother City Mojos I was totally won over by this arbitrary photo, hanging to the left of the stage, its random and mundane magic enhanced by red wine and surreal music – and the more I looked at it the more I knew what it needed to be perfect: it needed not a globe, but a very beautiful bottom, and on that bottom a very beautiful mathematical equation – in fact the most beautiful equation of them all! And that, most mathematicians agree, is Euler’s Formula.
May 31, 2011 | 1 Comment » | Share:
On Leadership
Leadership on the African continent and everywhere else comes under ever more intense scrutiny at this extraordinary time, and shows up the astonishing proclivity of generation after generation for choosing leaders who would happily eat them alive, as opposed to leaders gentle and kind who they would carry, happily and without complaint, allowing their monstrousness to be tamed.
May 30, 2011 | Comments » | Share:
The decision
All it takes is one decision and a person moults, leaving behind the dried skin of abandoned relationships, modes of being, or buildings – like the one captured here in black and white, photographed twenty five years ago in the Tsitsikamma forest, and inspiration for this moment.
May 29, 2011 | 3 Comments » | Share:
In quiet corners of a life
I more and more strongly suspect that the very concept of “I” constitutes a belief system. A belief system because in meditation one discovers how frail it feels (more like belief than knowledge). One feels then how there is something before “I” something far older and more connected, and one knows one is not “I” when in deep meditation critical self-awareness drops away and “I” is reduced to a very small and distant bit of consciousness: aware that “Before I” is resting, at peace and whole, and that it doesn’t need “I” (just as a child feels when its parents rest on a Sunday afternoon). And for “Before I” there is an element of disappointment when, after meditation, one is reduced to “I” again. Except that one isn’t. It is over-identification on the grandest scale.
For “I” life so often life feels like performance, because so few of us can be at rest in the presence of others. But there are quiet corners of ones life, when one is not performing, not even trying to be cool in front of oneself ! Perhaps even in the middle of African vastness, on an abandoned red sofa, which for me has become the reminder of surrender – of my “I-lessness.”
May 27, 2011 | Comments » | Share:
The great poet van Rensburgwonders whether one could conceivablycreate a poem on the eroticnature of loss.
May 25, 2011 | 1 Comment » | Share:
The lens
I was chatting recently to a young and enthusiastic lay Buddhist about everything being illusion, savouring the memory of how sure I felt about this myself once, and wishing I could pass on the only thing I feel sure of these days: namely how irrelevant all theories are in a world that only rewards action.
Illusion is itself illusion, but the lenses we peer through are real enough, and so one should at least try to get the prescription right.
May 23, 2011 | 1 Comment » | Share:
The embrace
Every year I build on my understanding of my own irrelevance and insignificance. By now it has become something monumental. Also, like most people I rely far too heavily on work for my sense of self. In the past I struggled to be calm when not working, not missioning. But lately I’ve learned that I relax quite successfully when I treat relaxing itself as a mission! And this new-found peace, when combined with the exquisite catalyst of irrelevance can turn me into blissed-out human jelly in no time. I sit on a bench in a forest, and as I breath out I allow the profundity of my insignificance to overwhelm me, and I think, “this is just fine. I could sit, right here, forever.”
May 21, 2011 | 1 Comment » | Share:
Staying in touch
An older painting dusted off for this exhibition, and still in my posession because people usually don’t buy paintings of graveyards – a terrible waste considering what wonderful places they usually are. There is the quiet (empty and majestic soundtrack to our awe of death) there are usually cypress trees, like calmly failing bridges between earth and heaven, and then there are the dead, so much more peaceful than the overly busy living, and far better listeners.
May 17, 2011 | 2 Comments » | Share: