Lightness of Heart…

The hunt for a decent online program to put together a slideshow of photographs into a video continues – with as much patience as I can muster…

I used this song to tie all the photographs together: images of my little girl unfolding, a reverse origami lotus flower, from birth to now. Almost four years old…

The tender joy, the poignancy of light, the sense of simple celebration —- this song tells of my love for her like smiling through tears…

Shadow Sailing…

This new year has swept me off my feet with flabbergastingly unforeseen excitement: a whirlwind! My life is a carousel on dizzying fast-forward — and glittery technicolour! And so, in lieu of a long, wordy post, here is one of the most poignant beautifulnesses that has besieged me since I last wrote.

Last week, I was blessed with the pleasure of meeting Frankie Beagle. Songbird, poetess, Joburg siren. (Hang on – that was meant to
be a dreamy allusion to singing mermaids – but the combination of ‘Joburg’ with ‘siren’ reminds me only of crime stats.) Anyway. Watching her perform and feeling her music wash over me, and her words weave indelible images around me — a cocoon of dreamlights and waking shadows, needs its very own blogpost.

My photo of Frankie Beagle mesmerising us, deep inside the tiny little womb-like theatre of The Alexander Bar!

Here, in the meantime, is her ‘Sailor Song’ video which was a collaboration with a shadow-puppeteer artist. Magical… 

PS. &Fish managed to find a whiff of internet connectivity in Manang on New Years Eve, and sent us a Facebook message full of tremulous excitement — sounding incredibly awestruck and almost overwhelmed at the immense, speech-robbing beauty of the mountains they are hiking through.

“We plan to see in the New Year by drinking sh*tloads of Masala Tea — alcohol at this altitude is not a good idea!”

The Waterclock Secrets of Moths

Mother & Child { November 2012 }

Sporadism. Induced by motherhood and some rather unsual circumstances over the last year. However, the beauty behind walking through fire and over mountains is the renewing, refining, reinventing and restoring of the soul and one’s uniqueness and role in the world. My writing and art, in particular, reflect an incredible growth in its depth, meaning and beauty. (If I may say so myself?! Saying that, the other area of my heart that has grown is self-confidence and finally seeing myself in a the light of my new, adult, unfettered reality.)

And so, after always cringing at giving interested parties the link to my online portfolio (due to fear of rejection – and knowing my work was created to grab acclaiming attention, and not out of the trueness of ‘me’), I am suddenly excited to showcase my new work. I have, in the last week, conceptualised a new way of putting my work together into portfolio format that is entirely ‘me’: it is unstructured and will grow organically alongside each painting and drawing, charting its journey with a map of anecdotal commentaries and photographs.  Here it is: Lisa Roberts Drawings & Paintings.

And, out of my love of sudden, utter randomness, a phrase which fell into my lap just moments after I picked up a moth from my dusty studio floor, to keep and begin a series of little drawings of:

‘… the waterclock secrets of moths.’  {Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude’ }

Negative

I wanted to write something about light. But light is a tricky piece of clay. Whether it’s the Christmas trees of light that fire off in your brain when you bite into an apple, or the distortion of the outside world through rain, it’s hard to do light justice.

It’s too easy to stray into the charcoal-simple battle of light and dark – good and evil. When in fact light is also what it cancels out. An illuminated doorframe, a blackened room beyond…is a single piece. The light frames and makes the blackness of what is not.

That moment when the shutter is depressed and the aperture snaps black is the moment that the camera imprints the image. The term ‘negative’ in photography is more appropriate than can ever be fully realised.

For me by the same ‘negative’ impression, beauty and devastation are lovers. They seem to keep close company and confuse my emotions with tragic joy. It’s waking up to find that the dark room does not cradle the person whose image followed me from a dream. It’s the defiance of New York City – it’s the hope of the Holocaust, the immobility of Pompei.

Nothing is as beautiful as what reminds us of what we used to have, or will never have again.  Perhaps beauty is a possibility not fully realised, marked by stars of imperfection and loss.

For me, beauty without imperfection feels calculated, contrived and intimidating – it is no longer beauty…it is awe. Whether that be the coldness of some precise church, or a glass-skinned skyscraper, I battle to see these things as beautiful – reverential but not beautiful.

My grandfather was a hard man – a hard man with a closely guarded heart. He kept his money close and his feelings even closer. When my gran finally released herself from a long battle against Lymphoma, my dad delivered the news to him.

It arrived on a cold June morning like a fated letter from some distant war. I watched my grandfather begin to weep as he allowed the words to find their way into the maze of his heart

I was in my early 20’s at the time and as I watched him in a cloud of my own pain, it felt like someone had picked open the seams of my understanding.

This was like the so many other times in my life that I have felt devastated and still felt the constancy of beauty’s hand on my back.

I can’t help but believe that the presence of light can still be found in the blackest of rooms. It’s what keeps me alive. There’s beauty in the breakdown.