239. Dark chocolate and blood orange on waffle (Dunkle Schokolade und Blutorange auf Waffel)

239. Dark chocolate and blood orange on waffle (Dunkle Schokolade und Blutorange auf Waffel), 2025, Öl auf Leinwand, 15 × 20cm, (Darryn Ansted)

Even though the saline eye-drops from the small capsule only dropped into my eyes, I could somehow taste them. Is that possible? Can you actually taste eye drops with your eyes? Eyes! My gut feeling is ‘no’ but my experience indicated otherwise. I studied many different visual phenomena over the years: synaesthesia, paradoleia, the Mollineux problem and so on. I read what Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote about the ‘grip’ of the eyes on the ‘flesh’ of the world. In the short story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl a character can ‘see’ with the hands. However, I don’t recall ever reading about tasting with the eyes. There are metaphors about a ‘visual feast’ or having ‘hungry eyes’ but not actually tasting. Probably the eye drops just triggered some reflex in my synapses or indeed my sinuses. Was it like the ‘splinter in the eye’ that Adorno invoked from the Greeks, which helps us to actually see the things before us more clearly?

The ice cream in this painting was maybe my favourite combination to taste. When I see it, I can almost taste that combination again. I did not intend to eat any of the ice creams but I tasted more than a few of them. Guilty as charged. Many ice cream scoops were harmed in this project. Mostly my family ate the ice creams. My open invitation for people to have an ice cream with me was mostly declined by the 50 or so people who saw it. Only a handful of people responded. I thought it would be nice to have an ice cream for free with me in a nearby village but people are busy even when it comes to free ice cream. Surprisingly, more people responded to my previous requests for hand models to paint. Also more people responded more enthusiastically to my request to borrow their possessions to use in a painting. It was a more casual invitation this time and with shorter notice given, I suppose. Next time I will return to a personalized formal letter. In the Wenders film ‘Wings of Desire’ (1987) Mikhaiil Gorbachev, playing himself, laments: ‘Everyone carries his own state with him, and demands a toll when another wants to enter… So much for the border’. It is a quote which I remember when doing art projects like this. That, and British (International?) contemporary sculptor Antony Gormley heading into the desert in Western Australia trying to convince very remote desert-dwelling people to participate in an art project of his. Maybe the artist is the splinter and the people are the eye.

I am always coming back to that film though, Wings of Desire (Himmel über Belin). I was completely bamboozled by it as a teenager in Perth but also made sharply aware of the imaginitive space that met these two emigres in Berlin. Maybe it lured me too to Germany. In the same film, another character, an old man called Homer (!) walking around the library in Berlin extemporizes about the loss of storytelling, saying ‘Tell me, muse, of the storyteller who has been thrust to the edge of the world, both an infant and an ancient, and through him reveal everyman. With time, those who listened to me became my readers. They no longer sit in a circle, but rather sit apart. And one doesn't know anything about the other. I'm an old man with a broken voice, but the tale still rises from the depths, and the mouth, slightly opened, repeats it as clearly, as powerfully. A liturgy for which no one needs to be initiated to the meaning of words and sentences…What is wrong with peace that its inspiration doesn't endure?.’ I erroneously remember it as simply him asking ‘why is there no epic of peace?’ and I think that is a relatively common question for Classics scholars at least. Supposedly we do not have one. However, in general I would find the great epic of peace is fine art. I don’t think my ice cream painting is the epic of peace that scholars have been seeking. I am thinking instead about other times and places like Morandi painting bottles under Fascism, or indeed any painting that tries something authentic, any painting that ‘walks the plank’, alone. They are all the component parts of the enduring epic of peace, all somewhat carved against the world like all the small chips of an axe blade that independently mean nothing but in their totality enable civilisation. That which individually are mere splinters.

Dark chocolate and blood orange. Bittersweet cocoa and bittersweet orange, and in enough of a measure to infuse the waffle with their complimentary flavors. These kinds of sensations in my mouth, are what I think now as thoughts but can I get more toward the sensual enjoyment through a painting? If not a taste to the eye is it at least more like a scent? As I write this I pause to observe the moon and tonight it also resembles a segment of orange with its semi-circle blushing rose-gold, mingling memory and sensation yet more, and yet more like Baudrillard describes in the quintessential text for new art students called the poetics of space. A segment of orange up there. A segment of orange down here in a ball of last summer’s ice cream. The piece of slate underneath the mop of the waffle holding up a midnight sky.