The title “Notations”— generally used for science and music—in my opinion fits perfectly with an artist’s “notations” in small notebooks and diaries and on single scraps of paper.
In the case of contemporary music, graphic notation is the representation of sound expressed through drawings, symbols and/or strokes, meant to record sounds that are outside the boundaries of traditional writing. Scientific notation, widely used in astronomy, physics and chemistry, is a simplified way of expressing numbers that are too large (measuring distances in space) or too small (counting molecules and atoms) to be conveniently written in decimal form.
In an artist’s sphere, the more subtle fields, otherwise undefinable, find a graphic/poetic/conceptual bridge—with its own language—that connects the “inner world” with the “outer world,” enabling a sensitive reading of the artist’s multifaceted personal cosmogony.
In such manner, contemporaneous musings become their own language over the years—an historical and evolutionary record, as singular writings/drawings often so different from each other become a whole. Different fruits from the same “composer” in harmony as a whole work.
The “notations” I’m showing on this series of works started in 1990 and continue to the present day, on annual diaries that I have added to and maintained continuously since I left Brazil in 1978. Although my notations were written/drawn over the course of decades, some works reflect a specific historical or emotional moment, captured in a diary in a furtive way on an airplane or a train, waiting for public transport, on a hotel’s little block-notes, on a bench in a museum or a reading room of a library, or reclining in a park.
The traveling artist—without an easel, brushes, paints or other equipment—using simply paper and a writing implement, captures and decodes the path of her own labyrinth of life.
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