Ransen's Blog

I had Covid, in my case nothing serious luckily, Covid-Light really. But the change in my sense of taste was amazing and unpleasant. I didn't lose my sense of taste, it was changed. I could still taste fruit and vegetables OK, but bread, pasta, pizza tasted like chopped up cardboard mixed with chopped up plastic. My wife made a pie for me, and I said "I can't eat that !" Beer and wine tasted odd too. It was as if someone had replaced my normal human tongue with an alien lizard tongue. The alien lizard tongue had been connected to my human brain, but/and clearly the wires did not match. At times it did not even feel like a taste, but some other sensation. Which got me wondering about how fragile our senses are. And what would be the result if a virus could affect our sense of vision or hearing or touch?  How limited is the spectrum of sensation we have, how little we know of the world "out there".  

For a project I have in mind for sometime in the future I was researching quotes from artists. And I came across this terrible terrible advice...   Luckily I turned to the greats and found... "Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really." - Balthus "I refuse to confide and don’t like it when people write about art." - Balthus "Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible" - Rene Magritte "The purpose of art is mystery" - Rene Magritte  "For art to appear, we must disappear" -  Stephen Nachmanovitch "The artist must be void" - Balthus "Avoid tautology" - Geoff Dyer/John Berger (don’t’ describe a picture which is in front of you) "One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, and live in the world as if in a vast museum of strangeness" - Giorgio de Chirico "The artist performs only one part of the