New Gondolas

 OK, just dragging image here from your email:

Now, I'm not going to do anything to it until it appears on blogger. When you get it, try clicking directly on the pic, and see if it expands.

Cheers!

Vegan in a Mason Jar, 2nd ed

Vegan in a Mason Jar?   circa 1.15.04

 

 Maybe it was because I hadn't finished my first cup of coffee. And is coffee good or bad for us this week? I get confused. Anyhow, for some reason the obviously serious story on NPR struck me as very funny. Seems as though a group of folks up in Asheville - North Carolina's version of Soho or The Village - were holding some sort of anti-beef rally. They were mad about mad cow disease. Now, out in South Dakota where a good number of my kin raise beef cattle, this falls under the heading of "Kicking Them When They Are Down" and is considered in bad form. But that isn't where I am headed with this. The story went on to say that the anti-beef protestors were handing out "vegetarian starter kits."

 

Hmmmm, I wonder what comes in a vegetarian starter kit? And what happens once you activate it? I am somewhat familiar with sourdough starter kits. You mix up the ingredients and keep the resulting liquid in a jar in your refrigerator. You can add it to flour to make sourdough, from which you bake bread. Is that the same concept we are following with "vegetarian starter kits?" You mix up the ingredients and keep it in a mason jar in the refrigerator? Then when the mood strikes you, you add it to something and make vegetarians? If it sits a long time do you get vegans? I had this terrible image of digging around in the back of my frig one day and encountering an old forgotten jar of vegetarian starter. I open it and discover that it is stuffed with tiny, incredibly skinny, vegans all shouting "Give us sprouts! Tofu! Tofu!" They swarm out of the jar and rampage through refrigerator flinging all the meat out onto the kitchen floor. "Murderer! Cannibal!" they shriek at me. I slam the door.

Obviously, I need more coffee. And a little breakfast. Eggs. Yeah, eggs. Maybe steak and eggs. Maybe just steak.

Landscape

Landscape

Of course, there is really no such thing as turning off your mind if you have a marker in your hand. I do remember seeing a number of Buddhist monks doing a healing sand painting mandala in the North Carolina Museum of Art a couple of days after 9/11. They seemed able to separate mind and hand - or maybe it was unifying mind and hand. Anyhow, either way the ability was the result of years of training and meditation. I think that train has left for me. Point is that as I was doing my "relax follow the marker cloud" images I naturally began to wonder what might result if I tried to intentionally guide that type of image. I have watched videos of Pollock painting and was unable to discern planning - I have done an attempt to create a Pollock which I may send along if I can find it.

What I am sending here is my attempt to use the clouds process to intentionally create a Landscape. At best I tried to keep the idea of a landscape, hills, rivers, etc., in mind as I moved the initial marker over the page. Same with the color selection. In "Clouds" I used a sort of "dowsing" process. Dowsing for water is a process where you take a forked stick that forms a Y, hold the two ends and walk around the land, when the leading edge dips you have found water. When dowsing for color you sort of defocus your gaze and let your eyes wander over all our markers, when your focus stops you have chosen the next color for the image, you then take the marker and let it wander above the outline image. When it dips you color that portion of the image.

Intentional image is different. You keep you eye on the paper, both in the creation of the outline and the selection of color. I realize that doesn't make much sense. But this is a first attempt. So, ta da, Landscape:

Escaping Genius

.I am just watching a video about Lilias Trotter, the immensely talented artist and long time protege and friend/companion, but most likely never lover of John Ruskin - the English writer, philosopher, art critic, polymath, and grand high influencer of all art in the Victorian era. It is a rather serendipitous video to have chosen for tonight as I have been spending several weeks now using “artists” as the search term for browsing Curiosity Stream.  Naturally, all the A-list artists are there, Van Gogh, O'Keeffe, DaVinci, Monet, Le Brun, Picasso, Rembrandt, etc., and others like Trotter whose names do not fall as trippingly off the tongue. The videos are of varying quality. The best seem to be those produced in France or French-British joint ventures.  Interestingly some of the searches conflated artist and genius, which is to be expected. However, Trotter more than any other, confirms what I often espoused to my students when reflecting on the place that art played in the life of an individual who truly lived the life of an artist. “Art,” I would declare, from my perhaps undeserved, but freely employed role of “the sage on the stage”,  “Is not so much something you chose to do. Rather it is something you come to realize you cannot do without.” 

Trotter, who according to Ruskin could have been the greatest female painter in history, found herself in a double bind. A watercolor genius of the first order, she was also a devout - some might say fanatical - Christian, called to minister to the poorest of the poor. She eventually followed her spiritual calling to become a missionary among the poor in Algeria in 1887. But she never really gave up painting. She kept a journal filled with sketches and watercolors until her death in 1928. She also maintained an illustrated correspondence with Ruskin for more than 20 years. So did she give up her art? In a sense maybe, but perhaps more accurately she married her art to her other great passion, her faith.

Like many things I may have professed throughout my years as a professor, I may have oversimplified my lecture on art. A more accurate assertion could be, to conflate artist and genius myself, that great artists - artists whose works becomes timeless - are geniuses who spend their lives driven by the pursuit of perfection in an art they can never fully abandon. And it is that realization that confirms for me the certainty that I will remain eternally grateful that my DNA unfolded in such a way as to spare me the backhanded blessing of genius. 

I do have some skills that occasionally edge above the middle of the bell-shaped curve, but truth be told, they most often remain in the realm of “art for the artist.” To clarify, creative endeavors can - or so I would profess - broadly be broken into two categories: therapeutic art, art we create for the pleasure, joy, or healing it brings to us; and art that informs, broadens, or advances ART writ large. There is certainly some overlap between the two. Emily Dickinson springs to mind. A poet who wrote, apparently, for the joy and healing it brought her, publishing only a handful of the 1800 or so poems she wrote during her lifetime. It was only later that we discovered the genius of this closet poet who, seemingly unintentionally, advanced the path of big ART.

So where does this leave us in our relationship to art? A bit stranded I would contend. To wander off course a bit, in my years in the classroom of what was largely and erroneously seen as an easy major, Communication, I encountered more than my share of student-athletes. Youngsters with dreams of "the pros" dancing in their eyes. While perhaps a handful realized those dreams to a certain extent, only Russell Wilson, stellar quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks, has achieved the level of fame and success of which the others dreamed. One out of the thousands of dreamers who passed through my classrooms. However, it would seem to counter the reasons I put my own dreams of artistic theatrical stardom aside and sought a somewhat smaller stage, to overtly discourage the dreamers out there in my smaller audience.

So I built in a compromise. As communication could lead to a myriad of careers, I had a standard "think past graduation" exercise in my introduction to communication course. Basically the student had to write an essay about the career they intended to pursue after graduation. And list what courses here at State would best prepare them for that career. But it was a two-part question. The second part was "If your ideal career fails to materialize for whatever reason, what is your fall back option that would allow you to still put all your preparation to good use?" One covert motivation for this follow-up question was to give the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, Olympian, Academy Award, Grammy dreamers a chance to think outside their dream.

Still for most of us, following the art that brings us happiness, joy, calm, inner peace, is by far the best path. Do not worry that you will have missed the chance to live out your inner genius. If genius does reside within you, chances are it will reach in, grab you by the scruff of your neck, and shake you until you can see nothing but its burning demands.

.

Clouds

 I have been working on "cleaning" the "Gondolas" picture for several days now. I believe I have posted the "pre-cleaning" version of that image here before.  The process is designed to ready that hand-drawn image, which is 10x32, for printing on canvas at about 20x48. Anyhow, "cleaning" entails taking the original into Staples and creating a digital version on their large format scanner. Then I pull that digital version into Photoshop and remove all the little tiny imperfections - blobs of color from the markers - so everything is "perfect." I know, I know a little OCD, but what can you do?  This entails zooming in until I am working at the 2 - 3 pixel level.  If I wasn't a bit crazed before, I found myself in need of a break.

Fortunately there is a good therapy for this. I call it "cloud creation," because it harkens back to something we all did as children. You lie on your back on the ground and look up at the clouds and see what figures you can see. Charles Schultz did a wonderful cartoon on the subject. Charlie Brown, Linus and Lucy are gazing up at the clouds and Charlie asks what the others are seeing.  Linus responds with "Well, those clouds over there look like a map of British Honduras in the Caribbean. That cloud over there looks like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculpture . .  .  etc." To which Charlie responds, "Well, I was going to say a saw a ducky and a horsey, but I've changed my mind." 

Cloud creation is sort of like that.  You take a large sheet of drawing paper, I used 14x17 for this example.  You put on some music that you like, take a black marker, and let the marker go wherever it likes. I used a few different kinds on the example because I like having lines of differing widths. Then when you feel like the doodle is done, or the music stops, you take a variety of other colored markers and fill in the spaces your marker created. You may have noticed I did not say "you have created." It is an important difference. Remember cloud creation is an antidote to the pixel level exactitude of "image cleaning."  Cloud creation is sort of like a Ouija board with markers. You just let it happen - no plan, no design, no intention. Just flow. And this is what came out.

Cheers!

 

Love is a Permanent State of the Heart

Once you truly love someone you are never entirely free from that affection.

That may seem a rather surprising statement to make in a blog written by a divorced/remarried man living in a country where the annual divorce rate hovers somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, and according to Project Sanctuary, “on average, nearly 20 people per minute are victims of physical violence by an intimate partner in the United States. During one year, this equates to more than 10 million women and men.” These media-forward statistics paint a pretty bleak picture for the odds for finding love at all, let alone a permanent version of it, not?

But those of you acquainted with my Distilled Harmony worldview will not be surprised to learn that having looked at love from far more than both sides now I, unlike Joni Mitchell, think I have a better way of looking at love.  And it is a way you can actually play along with. First, you need a balloon. I suggest red, but you can use any color you like. It should be a big balloon and a sturdy one because you are going to fill it up with, what else?, water. (So, weather permitting, you might want to do this outside. Inside, maybe the shower.) But these are simply precautions as the balloon is a model of a metaphor and ideally will not be broken. Now fill the balloon, but only maybe three quarters full, tie it tightly. The idea is that you should be able to squeeze the balloon so that it does not break, but mushes out into different shapes. Try it with your balloon - fun, eh?

Now here is the important part. The balloon represents all the love of which you are capable. But it is only a representation - to be an accurate model it would have to be a balloon without boundaries, because our capability to love is infinite.  It is perhaps easiest to understand the balloon model when we apply it to a couple increasing their family. You have this nice round balloon into which pops a child. So squeeze the balloon in the middle until you have a double sphere balloon. The amount of love - which remember is infinite - doesn’t change it just gets reconfigured. And the same thing happens every time a new beloved enters your life. Your love balloon gets squeezed and a new unique configuration occurs. More kids, more lobes. You meet a new precious person, another lobe is added. Sort of like this but with a much bigger balloon and smaller hand:

But adding a new lob is in itself tricky. In part because we aren't really in control. I wrote back in the late 1990s somewhere in The God Chord that we occasionally meet someone who is singularly in sync with our chord - love or lob at first sight. The contrary is true as well. Fingers on a blackboard. Your balloon is unaffected. The heart wants what it wants - not necessarily what your parents, friends, even you think you want.

In a related point, you will note that the model makes no provision for breakage. For lopping off a lob. For falling out of love. That is because I have come to believe that, from a Distilled Harmony perspective, reducing the expanse of love in our lives is counterintuitive.  Again a song; "Once in love with Amy, always in love with Amy." [Ray Bolger 1949] As we look at our love balloon and squeeze it to welcome new arrivals, various portions expand and contract. The conclusion I draw from that is that once we have loved someone we can never totally “un-love” them. We may come to view them through a haze of anger, disappointment, or whatever. But their little nodule is still out there in the love balloon somewhere, and sometimes it become dominant again. Think about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; Elon Musk and Tulah Riley, Eminem and Kim Scott, etc., etc. Think about you own favorite

 married/divorced/married/divorced friends or celebrities. Celebrities really have it rough. Celebrity itself makes everything more difficult - everyone is watching, attributing bizarre motivations to whatever you do, which makes you more prone to do bizarre things. Nice to be in the shadows, exploring our own lobs - old and new, big and little.

James Taylor sang, “Love’s the finest thing around.” Amen, James. And I, looking back over 73 years of children, friends, wives and lovers, feel that we serve love best by remembering and cherishing all those with whom we shared, and still, in some way, share love.

In The Hall of Forgotten Gods

.

First, there is the silence

A different kind of quiet

No joy, no sorrow

Just silence

But - with the memory of sound

Brass cymbals

Chanting

Murmurings in unison

Of many different tongues

Choral supplications

Quiet prayers with

The clack of

Prayer wheels spinning

The flutter of

Sacred flags in mountain air

But now

In the simple silence

There is no color

Only  - the memories of hues

Purple velvet garb

Multicolored icons

Crimson berettas

Saffron robes

Black vestments

All flickering in the glow

Of many candles

Lining walls or

Perched in candelabras

Of many names

With differing histories

But burnishing each tint

With a sacred golden glow

All now mired

In the ethereal space

Of no color at all

There are no faces

Of believers

Of any faith or friendship

The want of color

Has already banished

The rainbow of races

Once present in every

Imaginable sacred space

Gone as well the fabulous

Sculpted features of the

Faithful whose countenances

And representations

Graced stone and canvas

Carved and painted

The air itself

Is without identity

Incense and woodsmoke

Mingled aromas

Of sacred feasts

Are as absent as

Sound, color, and visage

And so this absence beyond

Absence collapses

Further still

Becoming singularity

Past time and knowing

And the singularity waits

Until

Called by

Some unknown

Herald

To return

To an expanding

Swift

Beyond possible

To reclaim

Light and

Sound and

Sensing and

Being and

Joy and

Love and

And the realization

Of true deity

Contained within

Each individual

Wrapped

With humility

Each entitled

To

A throne

Until around

The edges

Of this

Most fortunate

Recreation

Creeps

The cautious

Hopeful tapping

Of realized prayer

.

A New Year's Toast

Another New Year's Toast

I hope you had or are having a lovely new year's day. I'm going to send you a couple of bottles of wine - well at least pictures of them. I would like you to see if can see a difference between the two.  The first is the result of simply scanning a drawing in a large format scanner.  The second is the result of a "cleaning" of the first image. That means taking the initial image back into Photoshop and working on the image at the two or three pixel level to remove the little smears or blanks that are visible at that level.  The differences are visible in Photoshop and would be easily seen as a print.

I am curious to know how they appear via blogger. Perhaps the blogger app just compresses the images to the same level.

Here we go: