Wednesday 23 January 2013

Sculpture, kismet and vlad the impaler

I have been reading, well to be honest have nearly finished this book about poor old Vlad, history has not been so kind to Vlad, throughout the book Vlad talks of his Kismet, his destiny...



Wiki the free encyclopedia who does not give address information but tell me this about kismet and just about everything else:


Kismet
Kismet is a word meaning fate or destiny, a predetermined course of events. Of Arabic origin, the word spread to Persian and Turkish where, as kismet (kəsmet), it commonly means "luck". Currently found in a number of languages, including Bulgarian, Macedonian, Albanian, and Serbian, the word is normally used across the Muslim cultural sphere. The first recorded use of the word in English was by Edward Backhouse Eastwick who used the word, spelled kismat, in his 1849 novel Dry Leaves from Young Egypt.

So does that mean we are all here to do something profound; not of course like Vlad there are just not enough poles around and its not environmentally friendly! 
I am a teacher and when i was a kid i used to bring home all the unused stencils and unfinished work and pretend to mark them, took ages but i was content...
(Do you remember stencils? they were warm from the machine and smelled like methylated spirits, we used to smell them, breathing  it deep into our lungs, but i am Tasmanian perhaps its a Tasmanian thing...) 
Jon has always been a sculptor, even before he called himself that, collecting odd things and needing to keep them cause they looked good. putting things together, visually aware of everything around him. Perhaps his kismet is to sculpt
Perhaps some of us are going to do great thing, the odd few that just have to stand out from the rest !

Oh and the cats coming along nicely, thanks for asking. 

1 comment:

  1. Great post Chris, combining Vlad with the idea of stencils - although I think I remember them differently to you. I thought stencils were used to fake neat handwriting or to draw an impeccable map of Australia (without Tasmania attached). Kismet sounds like something we need to capture and bottle, too, by the way.

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