A thought I had this morning

[Thomasin Dewhurst]

I saw this portrait of the late actor Heath Ledger

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/s...9-7642,00.html

(which, in truth, looks more like Orlando Bloom), because, having had rather a soft spot for him (my excuse being that it was his acting skills rather than his looks that drew me to him; after all, one of my other favourite Australian actors is Geoffrey Rush), his name in relation to portrait painting caught my eye. I was led, via the usual meandering of internet searches, to another Australian artist, Jiawei Shen, whose portrait of a certain Australian art historian:

http://www.portraitartist.com/shen/blackrobe.htm

sparked an idea about the meaning and intentions of intellectual endeavour. This portrait shows the art historian arrogant, bare-footed and wearing an academic gown. He seems not in the least a brain-in-a-jar academic. His thinking seems to grow out of the seat of his back. His body and mind are not separate, and as a result his bodily and intellectual activities acknowledge and feed / feed off each other.

This boundarilessness gave me the idea that this art historian did not cling to a pre-conceived order (a known philosophical meaning to life). Instead he seems to enter into a state of chaos of random thoughts and ideas, trusting the tendency of chaotic states to resolve themselves eventually into new orders.

Thinking of this happening in the process of painting, the order that one trusts will be achieved is quite profound. It is not the mere stillness of paint marks on canvas once the painter has stopped painting

[Claudemir Bonfim]

Intense thoughts.
Your link didn't work, so here's another one for the H. L. portrait:
http://www.pagesix.com/story/heath+l...final+portrait

[Allan Rahbek]

Thomasin,

I was not able to upload the first picture, but the barefoot professor.

Thinking and answering as an artist my immediate suggestion to the special outfit of the Australian Professor Dr. John Clark would be that; since the artist is Chinese and the professor maybe ( I don't know it) has an interest in Chinese culture and art, the artist might want to suggest this connection with the dress .?

It could also be that the artist found the dress and the bare feet to be particularly picturesque, in the tradition of "Little girls in white dress and bare feet in the garden"?

But I think that my favorite interpretation might be that when he, as you indicated, put his life into his work, he has to be naked in some sense to make love with, and understand, art. The bare feet represent the nakedness of his mind, and the black dress, the spirit of a zen buddhist.

I don't know, yet, if dead is chaos, but life is for sure, we have to find our own path in life and make sense of it.

I find that art is my red thread in life and one that I can hone my mind on.

[Thomasin Dewhurst]

Thanks for the new link and for posting the actual portrait, Claudemir.

Allen, thanks for your comments. I think you have a very good point about Chinese culture influencing Shen's portrait. My knowledge of Buddhism is very limited but from what I do know I feel there is a similarity between a personal intellectual journey where the mind focussed by being cleared of extraneous influence (as much as one is able to do that).

When I suggested that death was a chaos, what I meant was that the order of being alive, the recurring, predictable body processes of being alive, and the recurring daily activities etc. are lost to the unknown, to decomposition claiming your body.