GLOSSY RED

GLOSSY RED GLOSSARY -

(thanks to Hall, Marcia (1992) Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting, Cambridge University Press: New York)

Bole – reddish earth used as the preparatory base under gold leaf in panel painting. P236

Cinnabar – a red mineral, mercuric sulfide, which when ground produces the pigment vermillion. P 237

Minium – red lead: an orangish red pigment. P 238

Ochre – an earth pigment ranging in color from yellowish to reddish to brownish tones suitable for fresco or easel painting. P 238

Realgar – a reddish orange pigment, related to orpiment and often used in conjunction with it. Also derived from arsenic and theefore poisonous. P 239

Sinopia – in fresco, the brush underdrawing applied, originally in the red earth sinoper, to the arriccio (layer of rough plaster) on which a second, smooth layer (intonaco) of plaster was applied for the final painting. P239

Venetian red – term used in the 17c and following to identify a red earth extracted from Badia di Calavena near Verona and used in cinquecento Venetian painting. P240

Vermillion – brilliant red pigment obtained from mercuric sulfide, with very good hiding power. P240

...many more to come

Essay by Alice Johnston focuses on Fierz-Davids 'ghostly bull-god'

an interesting review of Women’s Dionysian Initiation: The Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii by Linda Fierz-David found here ...

this is just a quote from the essay/review ... but it  highlights a part of the 'rite' that I didn't 'get' before ...

'Women are governed by the principle of relatedness, not because they want to be, but because it is their natural capacity to become enmeshed in people and things and experiences. Their tendency to build walls of animus opinions is an attempt to separate themselves from their over intrusive world. Yet opinions alone are insufficient; at best relatedness becomes negative. The alternative is indicated in the Villa of Mysteries:

The bellowing of the ghostly bull-god heralds the frightful necessity of rending all ties in themselves and giving up all relatedness in the world, in order to find relationship to the spirit and therewith also to themselves. Women must do this with the greatest vehemence ... This vehemence is necessary because subduing the worldly Eros surely means the heaviest sacrifice for every naturally womanly woman. She loses so much that she seems to herself like a ghost among ghosts. At this moment of development, a great deal hangs in the balance for every woman with an inner life, and it is a test, for no woman can know in advance whether she will lose forever the life which flows from relatedness or whether she will remain ghost-like. Only the god-spirit knows.

Just as the womanly woman needs to experience her separateness, the manly man, guided as he is by the Logos principle, needs to be initiated into relatedness.' 

initiation and thinking along the thread ...

Re initiation ... I have written an essay on Alice in Wonderland as a theorist of initiations, and here, the text itself is initiatory as well ... its called Inside Alice's Facets also this one on making which is also from the point of 'being in' initiation .... Grappled steps in the making ... and here's another one, Whoppers at Jouissant Play

Ariadne

Translations of original texts on her here ...

Good outline here ...

Plutarch, in his vita of Theseus, which treats him as a historical individual, reports that in the Naxos of his day, an earthly Ariadne was separate from a celestial one:

"Some of the Naxians also have a story of their own, that there were two Minoses and two Ariadnes, one of whom, they say, was married to Dionysos in Naxos and bore him Staphylos and his brother, and the other, of a later time, having been carried off by Theseus and then abandoned by him, came to Naxos, accompanied by a nurse named Korkyne, whose tomb they show; and that this Ariadne also died there."

Ariadne's thread

'Ariadne's thread, named for the legend of Ariadne, is the term used to describe the solving of a problem with multiple apparent means of proceeding - such as a physical maze, a logic puzzle, or an ethical dilemma - through an exhaustive application of logic to all available routes. It is the particular method used that is able to follow completely through to trace steps or take point by point a series of found truths in a contingent, ordered search that reaches a desired end position. This process can take the form of a mental record, a physical marking, or even a philosophical debate; it is the process itself that assumes the name.' wiki quote

Below are images from a collaborative project done in  2008 with Mela Fitzgibon and Susan Buret and myself  making   'the thread' ... all phrases, words,  sentences, notions, questions etc,  intuitively arose from the making and were stitched by hand,  The thread was made in parts and the parts were swapped between us  so that we picked up where each other had left off ... then the whole was stitched together ... it is very very long.


excert of thread ...

'... umbilical thread cut red rosso rouge . . . changing place changing time changing thoughts changing future tu moi manqué cloud threads tenuous hold aloft await clockwise re-arrive ----- undertow drags and swallows envelop me now whispering low to the lavender dusk sky remembered  weighing time too lightly shines from the mirror smeared . . . reflected secrets  oh blissful oblivion life on its way returns to a mist, its quickness is its quietness again : existence of this world of things and men renews their never needing to exist in emptiness . . . oh me oh my sigh lightly leaving perfumed trails musk frankincense and amber ~ haunting forgetful minds * threading mystic messages silenced tongues wagging truths and lil’ white lies unravel knots deceitful promises sing a mournful song in muffled tones her sorrow bleeds from flesh and heart alike euphoric blessing washing over pain memory fall in light entering flesh raw red wet space within holding stuck releasing heat shrouded in white sheet...'

by Majena Mafe
spinning the thread from the throat

Villa of the Mysteries, Dionysian Chamber
Pompeii Italy

Mount Vesuvius, Italy
(dormant volcano with a highly volatile history)


Red, as the colour of light,
was an important element of the interiors
of Roman religious buildings.

(John Gage, Color & Culture, 1993, p. 25).

James Turrell's Catso Red
Permanent installation at the Mattress Factory.

Roden Crater,
(dormant volcano in the Painted Desert, Arizona
and site for James Turrell's Roden Crater Project)

Other initiation stories ... to be added to

Red riding hood
Alice in wonderland goldilox and the three bears
Inanna  story