HIS WORK THEIR WORK HER WORK MY WORDS

In this suburban train, a little girl (five years old?) is reading a picture book. She comes to the word “passage” and asks her mother what it means. “Passage – the train passes, or a man passes in the street, the wind passes….” The child, who looks quite bright, does not seem satisfied with the answer. Doubtless she finds the examples too concrete.
E.M.Cioran – Drawn and Quartered

 

If in doubt I turn to Cioran. He pulls me away from the edge or out of the hole. His miserableness abounds and yet he has always managed to make meaningful that which is meaningless.
So when things get desperate and the moribund takes hold he’s there to cajole me. And things can get pretty bleak. It’s how it is. That’s the trouble with being born.

A few years back I bought a slightly knackered book containing a set of Goya's etchings. They were printed from the artist's plates, but Jake and Dinos Chapman had had a go at them. The brothers have always mined that dark place. Knowall pranksters with their clever cant and meticulous craftiness. They brought a smile to my face.
I don’t know what my daughter Eden’s drawings mean but they provide respite and comfort for the both of us and with my pithy titular interventions in her hand, they encourage hope.
Hope that sense might be made of this non sense

Perhaps we should publish only our first drafts, before we ourselves know what we are trying to say.
E.M.Cioran – Drawn and Quartered

PS "So we've gone very systematically through the entire 80 etchings," continues Dinos, "and changed all the visible victims' heads to clowns' heads and puppies' heads. The "new" work is called Insult to Injury. The exhibition in which it will be shown for the first time, at Modern Art Oxford, is called The Rape of Creativity.”
Andrew Kötting St-Leonards-on-Sea March 2012