Journal Notes

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You can fool other people but you cannot fool yourself. Eventually, your own conscience will demand of you the truth of your actions.

Yet, at the same time, that which you hide from in yourself, shall find you also.
You must then be honest with who you are and be truthful to others about who you are. So, stay honest in your art and it will serve you best if you do.

Art shows the artist. Art shows the world and human nature but remember; people are only how you choose to see them.
Life is just how you choose to perceive it.
This is why art is important.
Art gives human life its true dignity and worth.
That’s why the greatest art shows us the beauty in the most tragic of circumstances.
Meaning is found in overcoming oneself and in overcoming the suffering in the world and in existence, in life.
So that’s why one ought as an artist, to have compassion for the poor, the lowly and the wretched as they are the most beautiful of all beings. As the Master said; ‘the poor will always be among you’. Ask yourself this, why would this be?

When you have nothing, are nothing, you have nothing to lose. You will find this to be so from your own observations. The most beautiful and the most dignified are in the poor. See for yourself, it is so. They cannot pretend like some of the wealthy can. Yet, we all pretend.

Art shows the world through the artists eyes. So too, through the artists hands, their heart expresses all that feel and all that they are.

Through the faculty of the imagination, through the imagery of the poetic, art displays and communicates the deeper parts of the psyche and through the relationships communicated within such dream like reverie, the inherent genius in all human beings is revealed.

The poetic should not of course be so complicated as to be indecipherable to most viewers. Like Michael Angelo, who had the capacity to hide such deeper symbolism (God, the Creator, within the mind of man himself) within an image that all could comprehend and be in awe. The best is always, not cliche, but the simplest.

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I have observed and experienced enough about life to confirm the validity of the following generalization. That for the overall majority of society in the developed world, most people will tend to conform to the group, wether or not the group itself is reasonable or ethical. The remainder of the population can be separated into two other categories.
One group who are not developmentally at the majority group level, who are typically less educated than the majority and who have had less opportunities presented to them. They will either resort to their own sub-cultures who follow their own rules, or to an organized network where they may find some solidarity. The rest of the minority of the population makes decisions from individualized reasoning. These are typically people who are inclined towards some form of intellectually related or artistic pursuit or may be ethically minded people who have a great deal of compassion and care. Thus it is that the majority of the population will be at odds with the minorities of the others. These groups then tend to see each other as bad.
It is a very, very small minority of the population that is actually governed with a moral compass that is based upon reason. The reality is the majority rationalizes their views and decisions based upon the need to conform to the group. They do not think with reason or logic but think instead via rules and conformity to popular sway of opinion and rationalize their views based off of this. It is not due to lack of intelligence as per mathematical or linguistic capacities but to the ability and inclination to think from an individualized approach and to have care to be an ethical and compassionate human being.
What this means is that, as a result of the inevitable disruption to normalized standards, for those minorities of people who do in fact have the capacity to make decisions based off of reason is they are faced with the disturbing and disorienting experience of the violent response of the masses. The crowd is impersonalized and so is often cruel and without remorse or understanding. In fact its response is typically complete rightousness instead. The self individualized person then has the greater doubled task of not only thinking and acting for themselves, against the constant demands to conform, but also to be able to discern how to navigate the conundrums of the senseless, superficial rules that the masses conform to.
The artist, the intellectual, the compassionate soul, have a much more difficult time in the world in this respect. It is to and for these people that bring forth the culture and help the masses to raise in awareness, that the arts are truly and appropriately directed towards. People of same kind do inevitably recognize each other. We pick up upon common threads of our being in an intuitive fashion. Those people who have been able to individualize themselves to some extent will inevitably see their own mind in the work of another. The role of the artist is to build a nest, a feeding ground and a source of nourishment to the minds and hearts of those people who live to embody a greater dimension of humanness than is ordinarily the case. The artist builds their worlds that these people may find solace within, in order to carry out the tasks of their lives. Culture then, is not for the masses but typically for the few, so that the few can be as guides for the ones who choose to follow the greater, yet lesser tread and even lesser seen, path in life.

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Everything true comes from feeling. Even a thought is felt to be true. Thought is often considered to be true when really it is more due to an overriding repression from rationality. A feeling can be true, even though it might be false in thought. Yet this discernment it is at once reliant in the end upon feeling. Therefore it is through feeling that we might think anything to be true in the end.

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All day I danced and painted and danced and sung and painted and danced. In fact I believe I danced more than I painted, but it was all in the moment of joy. I danced all alone, but I danced only with you. I danced inside your heart, inside your mind, in love and outside of my own. I danced the world and her children. We all sung and danced today, each of us alone and dancing.

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I like it when you can stay a while on a painting and take your time in thinking about it. I like to sit in front of a work and contemplate its aspects. The way its moving, what elements are forming in it. How colours might work to bring things out. It seems to me that if one wishes to not only understand something, but to see it in a different way, to see its possibilities in a different way; you have to let yourself to pay attention to it. You just don’t look at it from a different view, no, you need to look at it MORE. You need to think about it MORE. But you have to think about it THROUGH a particular way. It’s not a method of thinking or a strategy of looking at something. It is just a looking about it, a looking in it, and then the mind can start to see things that it wouldn’t have seen before. Then you start trying this and that, and that changes the whole thing. So then you look about it some more….and it goes on much like that.

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Man is not ruled or governed by force of arms, neither by belief, nor instinct and certainly not by reason. The true force and decider by which all decisions, possibilities and influence undergone is determined by a natural sense of which he is, for the most part, completely oblivious to. Until he utilizes this force as master and wise ruler, he is subject to the unconscious power of the Queen of the faculties; namely the IMAGINATION.

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Just as in the late nineteenth century period prior to impressionism where works were made for the ideals of the salon and as the manufactured artworks of today, made for a wealthy plebeian consumer or for the ‘art world’ market, or for the ‘standard without standard’ of post-modernism; art made in accordance to these priorities lacks all life and originality.

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Imagination. Where does it come from? If the brain, how does it appear as it does to the mind? If from sense impressions from a world of physical forces, from what is it composed? If from a kind of platonic realm of reality, from where does it arise?
What is imagination? Why is it called the Queen of the faculties? Like a great conjurer, imagination can contain a kind of power that is at one almost infinite in possibilities and at the same time, completely with out form or substance. It gives rise to genius and rules the possibilities of humankind. How on earth can this faculty be overlooked or underestimated?

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What kinds of qualities might be apparent in an art movement of today? If each movement in art can be characterized by particular intentions or emphasis towards a kind of visual style or attitude, what might this look like in todays post-postmodern world? What would it stand for, if anything? Would it contain an emphasis on values such as significance, meaningfulness, integrity; as opposed to it’s former attitude of everything is the same as anything else and no values are more important than any other? Would this even be relevant, and might looking for values in art be a misappropriation of categories and if so, then what might it be?

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We associate power with politics when it is small mindedness and don’t recognize the great power in small things, like a poem, or a picture.

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Art may provoke imagery through the way God does, the way the way the interplay of the world and imagination might. The German mystical tradition of poetry, philosophy and theology can provide a return to a more primordial form of image making precluding the various views that have arisen. How to return to this primary source, prior to any assumptions or conclusions about the real is the beginning of a quest. An avenue that art has perhaps not yet truly heeded in its full capacity, or origin.

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How does one further ideas and approaches in painting, and how does an artist establish their art and ideas? Resourcefulness is a key element in both endeavors. The ability to find solutions to problems that present themselves, with perhaps limited means at your disposal. It is in fact the true element of natural creativity. One’s mind is always having to turn things into a new and different way, through varied means and patterns of perception. When problems arise such as needing to ascertain a vision unseen previously, in being able to find a way to extend a particular aesthetic normality into something beyond its origins; you use the natural response of nature to find a way to bring about this new thing.

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I do not normally like to imitate other artists. Though I have found the work of Eugene Leroy to be currently an exception. There is a fair bit to learn from the way he works and the suggestiveness he is able to bring about through his work. I hope I am able to bring this into my own approach, as I feel there is some very interesting things about his work. I would like to be able to extend and further this image making into an as yet unexplored area of painting.

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Listening to The Well Tempered Clavier, Fuge No. 13 in F sharp major (1:25 on-wards). I notice the initiating call of the harmony of the high notes that have a sharpness to them. There is a response and echo lower down in the keys. I like to listen with both my hands. The whole scale and working of this piece is in accordance with both sides of the body, and you can listen to this and appreciate it in this way. The lower notes are like warm, brown Autumn colours, the higher are more golden, light yellow, even a very light blueish white. The colours battle one another dualistically, dialectically. They complement each other harmonically. Towards the final segment there is a deepening and the lower notes briefly take over the dominant higher ones. Then emerges the higher note resolute and triumphant! Finally the piece is brought into a resolution of both sides in accord with one another, and the piece ends affirmatively.

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In Tibetan Buddhist thinking who we are and what we have become, in our quality and character, has influence upon others. So becoming awakened for the sake of all beings, has influence on them, so that they may also become awake. This is also I think part of the intention of the Tibetan Buddhist art, it is for awakening. I believe this kind of intention and influence can be incorporated into a western practice of art making, for the purposes of liberation and consciousness. Western art typically is about the times in which it is situated. There is a kind of sense of development in consciousness towards the relative realms of existence. The Tibetan art in particular is more about the emphasis of the subjective realm of spiritual realization.
This is of course speaking in broad terms, so as to make some differentiation, and I am not including aspects of Western art such as the architecture and design of the great cathedrals. Comparatively, due to cultural inclinations and ideological approaches Western art does appear to undergo greater change and transformation, although this perception may be unwittingly biased, as the writer is a Westerner. My point about this is though, that an artist may cultivate their character and qualities of their being and bring that into their art for the benefit of others. Even though much of the work may not be understood in its entirety, there is still this ‘quality’ that brushes off and passes through. Art is not entirely a semantic construction, there are also other intuitive aspects that are not so much a part of the system of signs and representations, but more about a resonance and feeling of energy. You can stand in front of a Buddhist painting and actually feel it’s influence upon your being. It is rather a unique taste. The Western works may also do this too. However it is not commonly acknowledged amongst academic disciplines.

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Your intensity is what starts that little man in the straight jacket who lives inside of us start kicking and screaming. Then all the other little people in straight jackets who are kept inside of the peoples heads start to hear him too and they start moaning and making wild yelps like monkeys in the zoo. Then the zoo keepers start to come for you, so keep an eye out for that, you’ll feel it on your skin. It’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s all just bells and whistles.

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From what places do you make good art?

Being in love.
Being compassionate.
Being in a state of joyful, manic, craziness.
From suffering and sadness.
From great determination.
From isolation and deep reflection.

They are all quite important.

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Sometimes in painting, when trying to introduce something new, you can lose a little ground. The recent advances that you have been developing can suddenly disappear, because you have been inadvertently working within new rules through the recent attempt in progression. This can come as a surprise when suddenly you look around at the work you have been doing and see the one you are currently pestering over is working under a completely different system, and you see that the advances of those other works are not in it. Do not despair, as you are still continuing to integrate an even newer system and approach. Trust in your ingenuity and trust in the process. It will unravel before you in time.

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Is that blood? Blood on your hands?
What? Oh no!
No wait, it’s paint. It’s only paint.
Look again, no
…it’s blood.
It’s blood, on your hands.

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Not a painter of transcendence, nor of heavenly visions. One need be a painter of life, therefore a philosopher, the best of poets.

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How to utilize paint? This is what you ask yourself. You see how it moves, this shapeshifter. How it moulds itself like a parasite does upon prey. Allow it to prey upon the ideas of the world it feeds on. See how it takes the shape of the realms of a multitude of deities in a single flower, or the body of a tarantula, in the smog above the landscape of a city. Now that way you notice it forms through happenstance, you allocate this into the representation of a form it suits. Now you see how you think you may extend it, as a great composer might lengthen the common use of a particular note in a harmony from a future time.

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It’s very nice to be able to look at an artist’s work whom you know. It is a mysterious kind of knowing. A message without words, detracts naught from its meaning.

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Most make to the market. The rare advance style.

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This is the rule for painting: Go against your better judgement often. When deciding between an accident and a deliberate execution ALWAYS decide upon the accident. Then, when your accident becomes deliberate change again, this way you will never stop learning. To purposely direct yourself towards making mistakes, this is called the Russian Polka Dance.

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One thing moves and influences another but not necessarily in any sequential order. It can be a painting done years earlier and one day that particular style or application becomes relevant. It can be the incision of a new style wishing to emerge. Do not underestimate all previous work. It sits underneath you like a sleeping snake.

It was difficult to stop tonight.

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A bit less in feeling today than yesterday. Seeing more about how the painting can be worked up in different forms, how they can bleed into a void. Seeing more how the painting speaks as to where it is going. Being critical where a mood is too heavy, such as being too dark. Not necessary. Good to be considering more about the question of expression. How does expression in painting work to greatest effect? It is how the colours can be combined, creating mood, giving rise to different and varied sensations. It is finding new moods in this way. It is working with greater freedom and spontaneous movement, but as the mood arises in its own accord. Expression cannot be faked when feeling. You know when it is taking place. It comes on you like an orgasm building up, but it is one of emotional, spiritual and magical evocation.

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Paint needs to fly of course. If you are not getting it dripping, you’re not painting; but you need to build it up over time. You have to sit with a painting, listen to her, she will talk to you. She tells you where she needs attention, how to touch her next. She will give you ideas in your head about what you might want to do to her, and sometimes she takes you there herself. You watch her moods, her colours changing temperature and taste, the texture of her skin. Those colours take time to learn, those moods are difficult to master or even to absorb and comprehend. Perhaps if you think you do, you are not such a deep painter after all. Those moods will take you places you don’t yet know. Though most of all, a painter loves just to watch her moving and to listen to her. Who cares even what she says, it’s all nonsense anyway, she speaks crazy things…but I love to listen, to pay her my attention is a delight. This is how I love her.

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It’s a good sign that you need to take more time to sit with a work. Rothko would watch his paintings before him for long periods. There are parts that become places that are like problems to solve. In the relation of the whole, one thing has another effect upon the others. Yet with this kind of working, this kind of Evokism, there is more of a way of unsolving that needs to occur and be brought about. There has to be the right way and degree of unsolving, of obscuration, that gives rise to suggestion, to potentials and possibilities. Ways of arriving to that space of uncertainty, of mystery. The place where imagination is born and gives birth. Opening ways to pushing at the edges of form, of thought, and of thinking.

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A little more difficult to paint, but then again also learning a little more. Need to focus more tomorrow. Somedays just go so strongly with quite big states. Sometimes it can be like today, with the feelings of frustration. Perhaps it is because of the strong desire running recently? Spiritual practices do have a big effect upon making art, but they are not predictable. Sometimes they bring more life, but perhaps also, maybe things can be perhaps too calm. I really think though that this kind of creative energy, sets people off, when it is running through you. It also appears to bring a kind of destructive upsetting, a real kind of disturbing eruptivity happens. It’s the awakening of life.

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It’s always kind of frustrating, concerning and disappointing when paintings happen too quickly, and then they start to fall apart too rapidly. The process of doing a greater number of them over time seems to work better at this point. It does reduce the risk of closing the work down and gives an opportunity to reflect upon it. More ideas, more works also mean more studies and material$. Will just have to get a gallery. Have to put the works somewhere!

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It is interesting, the body has two hands, both may move individually, they both individually are able to register a sense of touch. One hand touches something and it is experienced as sensation from that hand. In the other hand, that sensation is not experienced, as the experience is not located there. The experience does not happen in the hands though, it is located in the hands, but it seems to occur within a void of empty space, it seems to occur in the mind. So though both hands experience sensation individually, the experience of the hands sensation occurs in the one area of space, of mind. Perhaps it is why bodies make love, it is as two hands are holding and feeling each other, but with the one mind.

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The trick is to paint human agony so well that people have to look at it.

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A painter understands the world as flesh. An alive system, an organistic being. A living kind of flesh.

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Being an artist is thinking you are someone, discovering everyone thinks you’re no one, yet having that disturbing feeling people are just hanging around, waiting till you die.

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Evokist works are such that the imagination is allowed to live. Obscurity gives the imagination free reign. It lifts objects to dream in movement. Think of a child, staring out into the dark; who’s fears and imaginings play out the games of nightmares in the night.

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My life needs to feel like it is being torn apart. It needs to be on edge. Craving for security brings upon an anxiety, yet security deadens life. A stable base is important, for force requires gravity and momentum, it needs the pushing against of an equal force. It is like fucking. But if I close down on life, my unconscious will tear its way through. It will fight the death of closure. It will bring the impulse of desire through me. Life is not secure. Life is growth, flux, sex, breath. What is this itchiness of the soul, but the nagging of complacency.

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All great works have their own intrinsic relationships. They build upon a language that grows out of their own construction.The work talks to itself through its own self, it echos its self, it signifies parts of itself in the whole. The complexity of these internal relationships, require an elegance of simplicity that dance hand in hand. Although one aspect may be emphasized more than the other, one without the other and the work is weakened. The relationships build up a concentration within the mind. It is like a complete orchestration of music plays throughout the entirety of the work. It grows in the imagination and the mind starts to weave into the forms of the image. These forms are alive in the play of images and signs the work calls to; in the thought sensations of those rules that the work utilizes and extends. This is essentially how art fascinates the mind and attention.

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The light seeps into the evening branches,
The birds and children; their voices sing in the sky.
They play, they laugh,
And the women call your eyes, swaying down the street.
If you stopped your searching for a second,
You would see God dancing.

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Even if one evaluates the entirety of political currency and world historical dynamics, none is more complex or perplexing than the affairs of the heart.

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It is good to notice there is some kind of progression in your painting. Learning to draw, again and again, it is needed; always informs the work in unexpected ways. Sometimes I feel though that I am losing some sense of the heart or that spirit of kindness and graciousness. It is curious to note this. Perhaps it is ones dedication and intention, from whence it is focused and where it is looking for affirmation. I have been preoccupied in wanting attention, in ambition; although there is an overwhelming perplexity and futility felt in this goal. This is ok and I have to learn these things also, but I need to remember where the work is coming from and for why. That is where the strength truly is.

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Meister Eckhart says: “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”

Only the left hand is able to paint. The right hand is best used for mixing paint. With the left, you can forget.

Painting is a matter of learning to forget what you know, as what you know always becomes an obscuration to anything possible or new. Yet before I can forget, I do have to know. Yet I can’t know, as it won’t work, and need to forget.

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Genius has a tendency to go wandering and stumbling in the dark like a drunk man, where no one can see or make sense of where they ought to be going.
This is most true in painting, as an artist has to move beyond what they conceive of, into what Eugene Gendlin calls the ‘thinking at the murky edge’.

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When a painter looks at a painting, he talks directly to the artist, and knows them, through their nerves, their flesh and the very bones of their body.

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I looked now at the painting I worked on for 12 hours yesterday and now I see it is a complete disaster! What on earth was I thinking? How could I not see those awful little thin brush strokes look like pretentious little worms! How could this stupid purple grey colour have come about? God. Now have to wait till I have time to go back to it. Get the big brushes. Much destruction and flame.

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A good painting is composed of many different parts. It only really maintains it vitality when those parts are chaotic, unpredictable accidental and at the same time, deliberate, co-ordinated implementations and relationships.

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In a paintings own gradual becoming, it begins to take on its own sense of itself, what it is, how it is, its own rules that govern its sensibility. There is a time in a painting where you see that it needs to speak not as strongly about an idea, but the paint itself needs to take on its own – that which it is made up of-ness. Meaning, a painting learns to stretch, expand, open and become into a world of its own, a world it is already made up of, and is ‘wanting’ to become.
In this becoming, a work can fly from it one moment working, and in the next, a disaster. It has a bi-polar nature as its own proper process. As it continues to see-saw, the artist struggles and fights to make it work, to satisfy that inner knowing of what it ought to be, and could be.

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Nothing in the world unites people quite like hatred does and what would spur us forward if not for our jealous souls?.

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What will be tomorrow? Only let it be, a genuine working of the soul.

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hmmm…portrait of a city. That’s an interesting idea.

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Aesthetic genius is the extending of the range of form and experimentation, in the proper measure.

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It is entirely honorable for one to be mad, to be creative is to be fairly insane. When one paints the king in the palace of madness, one is transgressing the most benign of laws, for this is painting the portrait of God.

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As what the heart knows to be true, this soul shall follow the path of an artist, for that is what one is. Through this, one’s true being shall find a way to do all things that need to be done. That power is one to be trusted.

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It is like as a god that an artist determines who, when, and how someone is designated immortality, even not the artist but the daemon to whom they must pay their obeisance to.

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The bird before dusk calls to the bird by the dawn,
Says where do I fly when the sun is forlorn?
The ocean is frozen and the country cold over,
Yet the wings of our brother do melt at the shoulder.
How does one float, when the clouds are like stone,
And the rivers and valleys are parched more than bone?
Those humans who watch us, look up to our flight,
Though wary am I, when the sky is not right.

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There is a truth known by both lovers of beautiful form and also by the damned in hell; and that is that vanity seduces us all.

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A good artist always remains true and makes nothing up, but a great artist…a great artist makes up everything.

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Painting is about the paint speaking. It needs form as form speaks of ideas. Paint needs to move through and out of form and come back into it and it needs to do this because it not only has to speak about what the form is, how it feels, how it lives inside itself and how it, as idea, lives inside the mind. It has to enfold out and envelop itself again, because otherwise it fails to live both worlds, of form and of mind and the in between; that of sensation, truthfully.

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On art and friendship and love:

What is friendship to an artist? It is a returning to one’s companion and finding out they are no longer fulfilled with the relationship such as it is. They discover there is an inauthenticity in the picture they thought they had of their friend, and as a resulting mistrust towards the object they once felt such affection towards. It is here that the relationship is tried and one either abandons the trajectory that the friendship was following, or one begins to distinguish some new potential in the engagement and rather than salvage what remains, begins to unearth a greater element from within the very fabric and texture of its being.

As for love, it is as Holderlin writes:

‘If you drop an old friend, laugh at the artist and
Meanly, vulgarly judge, wronging the deeper mind,
God forgives you; but never
Break the quiet that lovers know’

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It is different when one ‘loves’ art as a lover, than as a friend.

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Perhaps it is just the conditions of my life, but it seems the times a painting just begins to boil and bubble, the people around you start to pop.

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I think there are two times when extending into a painting, that one wants to get a sense of. You can either stretch a works capacity to an extent where its own sense starts to continually take its own form, and establish its own rules, while remaining alive, open and fluid. The process itself, if allowed for, can sometimes even build its opening. The other is when you are trying, and you are closing the work down, making into something already known, and deadening it. It is then when it needs to be left alone for a time.

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I don’t know what my pictures mean anymore than anyone else might, but I do know from where they are painted and that is the part I really need to be critical of. I have to go by my feelings, they speak the truth.

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My feelings tell me frustration. I know when I am burning and when I am not. You need to always aim to burn. You know it when you have let something drop, even just a little you feel it as a sense, like having your guts taken out of you. That burns you instead of your painting. I am eager for the next day I paint, for I shall even the score.

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You need to insist on letting the paint speak. You are frustrated because of your limited vision. Let the picture go. Open up the form. Break the structure open. Loosen your pallet, forget it all. Your movement will talk and your painting shall speak.

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It can, and quite possibly only does; take a whole day of painting when one becomes absorbed and engrossed in painting when various colours, moods, textures, touch, taste, sex awakens with a gorgeous lust and vivacity that sparks the mind with fascination. The appetites are a living intelligence.

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The artistic temperament, when removed from its form of natural expression and isolated to a region of the brain and behavior, may be summarized succinctly with the term ‘moronic’.

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It is always through the accidental that a painting appears to work. When something is too deliberate it becomes contrived, with out interest and dull. An extension of effort and experimentation is required to continually rework the form. This has a tendency to give the work its loftiness, its abnormality, its Jewishness; which is its character and strength. In the end it always needs to ‘feel’ right. The truth of it is an aesthetic sensation.

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It is a good thing to find you are learning to paint all over again.

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That which the world values and sees, has no value. This is most obvious upon even a small amount of reflection. What has true worth is noticed by some, but passes most by. When you realize that beauty comes from the openness of your heart to the momentary pause of life, your searching for endings cease. All that you need is very little. You require the basics and essentials for who and what you are in a deeper way. Every thing, and every one is…beyond a word like ‘beautiful’.

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It would be good to draw in the city wandering, more at night time.

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The small things are the most intimate.

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There is a point in painting where your expression and aliveness, which contributes a large part of a works openness begins to close down. It tends to be a point that starts to become clearer, you notice this point more often. In the initial moves of the making of a work, even a drawing, the aliveness and openness is most potent and free and spontaneous. Then, as you feel you need to clarify, describe, make apparent to the eyes of another, it is narrowing to a point of closure. There are degrees towards this, and it is one’s practical sense to know when it is getting to an edge of closing down. It is hard to turn away then, very difficult. You want to fix it of course. So one ought to turn from it as a hurt lover. Have other works to move to. Throw it to the side, and know you will return. There are other times of course when you must take it further, deepen and take some bigger risks. Extend yourself with an intense will. It’s all in the experience, the frustration, disappointments and those moments which are incredible and new.

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Those who are difficult, take you far.

If you see them as yourself.

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Love full, forever,

To know that,

Naught ever.

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Pride, anger, blame, fear, jealousy, on and on. It is all there in our interactions with each other. I shall not stop forgiving myself and others for having an ego, for being blind. I shall use the ego as a tool, as a brush, as paint, as art. I will always have the ego, it won’t go away, so I must learn to use it as a work of art itself. From my pain as well as my joy and love, do I find new ideas as they emerge as I heal and seek and claw and fight. Humility is there as grace is, when I see I know nothing, yet from this not knowing, must decisions be made and learned from, just as a work is made and learnt, as a process and in faith and trust. In different ways, often I find the day I am painting could quite possibly be the last, so shall I make it the most.

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Once you’ve been in hell for a while, you start to wonder why you haven’t yet seen the devil.

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Stupidity always has an excuse.

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How easy it was to know peace,
With my heart always closed to You.
Now, I can never be free,
Or again live gently.

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Our understanding arises from the metaphors which we are able to utilize. Linguistic understanding and interpretation is based upon metaphor. The Greeks considered imagination the queen of the faculties. The limitations of our imaginations are the measurement of the degree of what we may understand. The language of visual and related culture is deeply ignored by education. A Visual Culture ought to be at the forefront of our collective identity, if understanding is what we truly value. The avant-guard means ‘the advanced guard’; at the front.

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We need to renew rituals for endings. Christmas is at the end of the year and is a joyous time signalling the birth of new life and a new way. Our ways are certainly ending and a new way is being given birth. It’s important we find a physical myth in which to conduct this kind of globally shifting energy. I notice that much of the media stories are about tragic passing of life. Why can we not find ways to celebrate endings in our westernized culture? We do not believe in the cycles of nature any longer. We only think endings are bad, yet they are as wonderful as a winter heralds in the coming spring.

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Only those who are artists in their heart can ever know a woman in her heart. As when they are creating, they are accustomed to how often an image changes while they are consumed with her, and how often they fall short of expectations. Like a painting they can tell the difference between a real woman and one who’s pretending. They also know the ones, like the great works of art, whom they will never forget.

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What does one think about when alone at the easel…? I think of all the memories of people whom I care for and am fond of, and all of those whom I have been hurt by and where I feel closed in my heart. I continue to think obsessively about them all until I can no longer tell the difference between the two, and there is only tears and love.

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Follow the hints of dissatisfaction and enter into frustration, for this is where the work is. It is far better to struggle with your work than to comply with an easy image which means nothing at all to you.

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Only delicate things ever have charm.

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True naivety is a treasure kept hidden from the outside world. One wishes only to be deeply naive.

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Beauty is the greatest transgression of the authoritization of a technicitly rationalized utilitarian background; it highjacks form from its teleological direction of usefulness and trans-forms the world, of beings of functionality to an opening of an alterior way of being, through what is commonly miniturized in the name of wonder and enchantment – namely the aesthetic appreciation of art.

Considered in the adjacent direction: It in effect makes a break, a rupture through disclosing the chaotic and superficial overall directionless-ness and purposeless-ness of the regime of functionality, through a totalizing absoluteness of perfection.

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I will do anything for beauty. If it gets me a bed for the night; my soul, she can have it.

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It’s good to read, to finish a book, but not in a way so that it deadens you.

It’s good to paint, to work to the full, but if it’s without life it is not art – and you will know it.

So cultivate your passion with care, know when to breathe in the air, and when to strike with burning rage.

It shall visit itself upon you, and you will know it.

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Night sky is a dark ocean,
And she is
The black magic, from the nerves, she takes you
Takes over.

And for a time,
Does dance inside you
So you may dance, outside of her, and beyond
Far past the tears.

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An artist must always be open to changing the work. It makes all the difference in what is just another mediocre painting and one which goes the distance towards something which is a well developed composition, an advancement in style or even something altogether new and unthought of before.

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Meaning is not a thing in itself; something which we can add on top of, commodify, a value to purchase, entertain, exhibit and be a spectator to. It is rather an ontological characteristic of culture itself. Something which is a mystery and which retreats from grasp, yet beckons us nearer.

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I am one who believes in being a free thinker, therefore no thoughts are off limits to my mind. This goes along with communicability and dialogue. The only real exception is where this may cause unneeded harm or suffering to oneself or another.

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The life in a painting can hang in the moment it takes to summon a few gestures of the brush. They can be lost and slip away when unawares the artist tries to form an image and in doing so closes it as one were to close the door of a tomb or a coffin upon a friend whom one once knew when living. There is always a struggle towards life.

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One ought to paint flowers the way the golden hues are dispersed in spiraling clouds when one urinates in the bathtub.

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I have once heard a painting. Heard it, rather than see it. I happened to stroll into a Kevin Conner exhibition a few years back, when the painting I was only glancing at started to make noises. I do not understand how the artist managed to do this, but he uncannily brought the sound of the atmosphere into his work. To make paintings to talk in such a way. There is much to unlearn.

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I think I have erred in thinking that one can create poetic works through thinking like a poem. I don’t know if it comes out in the same way. I think perhaps it needs to come through in the work, by doing it, in the making of it. I think I need to go back to basics more. Yet something is telling me, making me to push forward, not to go back, and to open it up.

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People would normally be afraid if they were to lose their mind. Artists are normally afraid of finding them.

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There is a fine line between good painting and bad painting, for sure. Yet the painter who takes no risks is no artist at all. They are only the living dead. The apathetic have more life in them than one who makes an ‘image’ and stays afraid to cross all they think they know.They are content with masturbating themselves to their own satisfaction. I say no. You have to know when to bite the bitch. Not to do so fly’s in the face of all that is moral and good. We should always take care lest we fall to temptation. Oh father forgive us our sins!

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It is not a comfortable feeling when you see your work and experience it failing to meet the mark you feel it ought to. When there is the dissatisfaction with your own work. You can console yourself in your thinking to a little degree, understanding this is not an uncommon experience amongst our kind, artists as such. There is also the consideration that one has reached a point where a further step is felt which can be taken, and the stretch is a tight one as yet. Still, it is not at all a comfortable feeling to bear. It dwells upon the mind and chest in a quiet, frustrated kind of way.

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You are biologically made to love your family, if this were not the case, the population of the human species would most definitely be zero.

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Tonight I danced with you, I was the god, and the devil at once. You sung with me and watched as I traced your outline and bathed you in colours. Then you got difficult with me, and we fought terribly, I hated you for that, because you always win and make me look a fool and you torment my mind with all my inadequacies. I am never good enough for you, when you are not the way I want you to be. I can’t tear myself away from you when you are like this, I don’t know why you torture me so much, my dear art, is this how you treat all your lovers, or am I just the odd man out? Oh, but you do make me feel so very, very special.

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You who wish to lose yourself in the way. You can’t ever lose the way, but it can be lost to you, yourself. You find yourself wondering, what is it, what has disappeared? I do not know what it is, but it is something. Is it something in the work itself? Or has one’s being changed in some way? Then I see and come to realize, yes, this one has become distracted in things. Things which are of lesser importance have appeared to be of great necessity, overwhelming attention and preoccupation. This all takes away from yourself and your presence. It prevents you from going deeper into your work. Do not persist in nor tolerate your petty wanderings. You must always go much deeper than that. Your painting, your art, calls to you and it says ‘do not turn away from me’. Leave the false illusions behind and do not place your empty hopes in them. They are like a chalice of wine where you drink only disappointments and loss. You will know which voices to listen to, at each time, and you will let them speak and sing. You whom I adore and support are much, much more worthy than that. Come and give yourself to me. I am worthy and wanting only of your truth and your best, so give me only this. Adore me, for your god is worthy of adoration. Trust and follow your real way. You must surrender yourself to the art, there can be nothing less than that. Then you may rest, dear one, and be with me in all eternity. Your art is not where you think or believe it is. It is much , much further than that dear child.

So I have to go there.

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Yes, you need opportunities, ways through, and different eras do have their own hills and passes. but look at history and all the greats, do you think they had it easy? You use your life circumstances to bring out your strength and character.
To follow your bliss does not mean to take the easy path.
In the end, it comes down to one’s inner Strength and true Will. I believe this gets cultivated to the degree that one is able to go deep with their work, in solitude. We need each other too. United group masterminds are often left out of the equation.

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There is a strange stage in painting when you reach a state of almost a sort of exhaustion and there is a point where you get to when you feel that you may ruin the work, or that it is feeling like it is going awfully, but also where you can push into uncharted territory. You don’t really know wether to pull away and wait, or to continue and see it through. It is like you go against your better judgement and let habit, or let ‘it’ to decide. That is how you break through I suppose.

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I will die and it shall not be far away. I am afraid of being no more. What is this ‘I’ that fears its passing?

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Here an experiment, simple one, yet revealing: Close eyes, run around for a few minutes, note your observations. What are your conclusions about the world overall?

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What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

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Life is sad without pictures.

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This Kali Yuga is the energy field of controversy and confusion. Artist as light-worker, see if you can get behind it, the energy, and direct it. See Maya for what it is. The energy field, the Shakti, can be channeled and directed through the form; the body and art and offered up to Shiva.

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No matter how many failures in a painting you go through – and each time there is a failure – still, it is always worth the effort. Each previous failure is the success of the next.

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There are times when you have to believe in the angels. At these times you do not have the choice. They are the times that the angels do not let you have one.

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Looking at Monet is like looking at pornography. You know you shouldn’t, but God it looks so nice.

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I would like to know the way to be honest and live with integrity while dealing with people who do not seem to be.

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You will give nothing to the world without first giving yourself a standard.

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Sometimes in making an art work, no matter how beautiful it was, says ‘I cannot be this anymore. I have to be something else’. We have to listen to it when it says this. For it knows itself for what it is. It cannot go back to what it once was. No, for there has been too much change since then. but it does tell us what it can be. It does in fact, demands, to be greater than what it once was – and nothing less than that. We as artists cannot decide this, all that we can do is make sure that we bring out its beauty. Yet it has a tendency to remind us what it was. It does remember and holds us to its task.

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I have found, those more open with their own eroticism, often contemplate their morality. Sexual love can be a way of living through, and becoming intimately known with one’s own death as a path of love.

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The places of the heart are wide and open, when you go to them, you don’t try to change what is there by making it into something that you already know. for then you never know yourself, and you can not know another, or allow your self to be known.

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On being a mule: real work is its own reward. There is truly nothing like the wealth you earn in yourself from working in your soul’s task in life.
It goes without saying for without saying it, it goes. You tend your garden, you grow and cultivate your nature. Your real work brings you integrity, strength of character. All the work you do from yourself bears good fruit, healthy children. You meditate from your tantien, contemplate, read the classics, involve yourself in great music, make love, have heartfelt compassion and understanding, reflecting upon your interactions and learning what is true ethics and true morality. In doing so, your efforts deepen you.
Your work, your art, is reflected in who you are, throughout the layers of your being. You find that you must follow your own compass, as this is the only way you can find yourself, what you are. That way you see your true value, for who you are, and you understand your real place in the world, from yourself. You also realize gratitude for the challenges you face, the resistance you go through, as you find the great strength which it brings forth out of you, from your soul.

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Love is Woman and yes I am in love with Her in constancy. In that full, embodied, flowing, blissful constancy of easeful, open loving. She who is behind the beings who walk her. She who desires for them to dance her, to be danced by her in the wind. Always turning as a butterfly in the breeze, she arrives upon you, landing from flying through spaces which move through her. Crawls around your limbs with shadows emerging from the colours of her winged auras.

She knows me, and yet pretends to forget herself in memory, and so to remember; she touches me in places I yearn to be touched. Caresses the parts of my soul I knew not know craved so longingly for her delicate strokes. Her fingers entwine my hands and her tongue pierces my mouth, eyes, ears and I hear the voices of Her eyes and her sighs as she becomes my skin. I see as she sees, tastes as she tastes. And so easily draws me into her. And just as She swallows my mind in ravishment and swoons as music in the depth of my belly, she tells of the spaces her wings take her to.

Landscapes which gods run barefoot through, she says she has laughed with them in conversations of chanting flames as they place time before a mirror and plait her hair with woven friendships. She says she has made friends with the strangers in my body. She tells me they walk in footsteps under my skin. She knows intimately, the sounds they make as the melody from their feet echo in my bones; exactly who goes where, and which rooms the lovers sleep in and which corridors the lost cry to her at night. For they love her dearly and tremble as they feel her dove like touch.

And certainly I ache for her always, for as she brings herself out of me, in order to exhale, she breathes me out of myself. Let her take it out of me while she aches for me; for Herself. Her flavours of light delight the interior of the lake which resides as reflection of us both; Of the clear world. As birds singing in the green and in the blue, which shapes the earth. Then the bells of her church tower ring and the fragrances, and opium of ruby red treasures merge into a fluid kingdom where she lays on a throne of glistening oceans and murmurs of distant thunder. Rolling hips torso and spine and skull, entwined as a snake, her hair wraps around wrist, elbow, fist. Moves with the intelligence of a moment, reflexing, directionless through the minute lifespans of stars caught up in a breath of oxygenized curiosity now hiding from my hands, having disappeared. She has become a wish. A prayer to mould the supple blends of vibrating temperatures which hold us together in the still thoughts of a day.

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Art, creativity is an orgasmic phenomenon. The ecstasy of the heights of sensation. The arousal of death is the release into the higher, it is abandon. It is the intoxication of the perfume of a full reality which spurs to death and surrendering release into new unknown realms. It is procreation. It is madness, destruction, yes it is insanity, love, it is Woman. Woman who births new children. Woman who is the unquenchable fire of colour. Woman who is fluid tears and who’s breasts arch up toward the liquid sky, the yearning of sound itself. It is the ever expanding desire and depth of longing to deepening touch, to embrace, to open and penetrate, that mystery of fascination and wonder, which is aching to be free and freed. It is the drive to love the world, to playfully smack, tease and delight, and birth universes. It is nature, life, naked and raw and wonderful.

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You are always looking to the other, you who fear you are un-real.

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An artist is only ever half a man, continually ever trying to complete himself, to make himself whole again.

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The strength of a work comes about through the thorough investigation and innovation in working an exploration of a work. The intensity of a painting is generated from the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy put into it, from the artist who has absorbed the world around them, turned it round within them and channeled it out of them, through the heart. This is how one continually strives in order to make something beautiful.

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The process of bringing out a work, of bringing it’s form forward, of advancing it; is a precarious act and similar to an art of war. It takes a balance of contemplative and reflective suggestion, of being with the work and listening to what it says is next, or of what could be for it; of being delicate and gentle in direction and choice of gesture, expression and movement as well as maintaining the openness of spontaneous expression which is often easily found in the initial stages of a painting, yet is so easily closed down in upon, in the bringing forth of the work. You must overcome the fear of making a mistake, while at the same time reserving the energy, as well as feeling through the right time for allowing an energetic expression in the gesture, in its unknowability of what comes through; experimentation. Sometimes it can be best to put a work aside and give it space. A painting keeps it’s own time, an artist must only listen to it.

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The greater the range a poet has, the harder and more important are the words selected. The finer and fainter the idea, the more difficult it is to locate it, to evoke it. The more a painter opens their thinking, the more experimental their bravado; the narrower, more vitally significant, the critical directions to be taken. To paint can be a head full of hell. The problem is walking straight after dancing with the crazy. Who wishes to turn away from that kind of love?

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To the saints I say a little prayer. Good night saint Rimbaud. Good night saint Gainsbourg. Dear Vincent…please be with us a little longer, for we need you to stay here. You have workers in the fields and you are painting them still.

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In love it is the most painful experiences that are the ones I have relished most.

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Is it the act of human cruelty we find unbearable? Humans and other living creatures endure enormous hardship at the shallow living of others and even ourselves. The pain is recognizing the absence of beauty. It is in the recognition of beauty that meaning is felt. There is beauty in the shame of being part of the human species. Perhaps you would think of this as unethical and heartless, even callous, turning life into art. Yet how else is one to make sense of existence? The question then is how to affirm it as beautiful, without denying its ugliness.

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Even though one’s life is much of a mess, when a painting is working, when the thought in it advances; then the world is magical and everything contributes to its goodness and wonder.

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It is not paint, it is the tension of the flesh searching, thinking, feeling. It is not the real, it is the tearing of the veil. The caress of a gentle heart is a strike of passion. How is God spoken? It is only in the anxiety of the body in an environment of nerves and impulses. One leaps to work, can only even work with claws of the soul. In war, art can only be made as an act of aggression, a violation of the species. Creation is agony and strife, the yearning to kill. I must destroy all that is real and I shall make only sounds of children’s laughter.

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You are an artist, that is your fate. Once you accept it, you can only live it out.

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I want to be Russian, drink lots of vodka in the morning, and not cry any more.

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Be one not of one’s time, but a future one. For art is not for what is, but for what is to become.

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Great minds need to be held by great hearts.

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To practice art is to become a living experimentation.

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Again, it’s the intelligence of aliveness that we want in a work. The becoming into being and shifting of our embodied, thought world. Thinking needs to be provoked, not distilled. An artist need not be a philosopher, but she does need to be a thinker.

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At times it feels the fates are against you, much of the time. Then it’s as if the gods are on your side swiftly riding you high into the sky. That is an artist’s life.

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We do our utmost to make our lives more bearable, less painful. Yet our suffering never ends, and all amounts unto the same. So then what is art? It is but a silent, screaming protest.

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The hardest thing in painting is keeping the work open and true to its poetic nature. One has to learn to deepen a work without closing off its living dreaming and its musical dancing. It is truly a task for life.

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Can one find their heart with their head?

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When in situations in life where one would rather be doing that which the heart knows to be fondest, learn to grow in depth, strength, determination and compassionate understanding to fulfilling ones deepest truth.

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What is it when the Truth is felt? That is called Faith.

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Nothing great ever came out of pride or retribution. Great things were always made from the overcoming of suffering and injustice.

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A painting is against the present, becomes in the future and echoes the past. It shows itself, as itself; what it is, from what it is. Its making practices, are its communicative meaning.

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One who believes dreams are ephemeral has never carried one and does not feel the weight of the gold in their limbs.

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Wish Bones

Like a wishbone left unbroken,
You and I are one.
Left unbroken,
No wishing made.

Like a wishbone broken,
You and I are one.
Broken apart,
Wishing to be made.

Which would you prefer?
Left as one, without a wish
Or broken,
Made for wishing.

Wish-less you are one,
Yet in wishing you are made.
So now you’ve broken,
As it is your wish.

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The hardest thing in painting is keeping the work open and true to its poetic nature. One has to learn to deepen a work without closing off its living dreaming and its musical dancing. It is truly a task for life.

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In human relations, words mainly hide the truth to others as well as our selves. Speaking the truth is a difficult process. It takes courage and determination to persevere. I practicing speaking truthfully I realise how cowardly I am and also how dependant I am on pleasing people out of fear of consequence. The unknown is experienced as just that. You really don’t know what can happen. I can feel anxious and worried but at the same time, I feel compelled and driven to be truthful. To live truthfully. Honesty is a reliable strength. I have found art a way of recognising my real truth. The truth of my unconscious mind. Art is liberating when the truth can speak through it, no matter it’s apparent ugliness. With the truth brought to light the denied becomes shimmering in its innocence.

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if We live strictly in the realms of imagination and the visionary we are lost in poverty stricken fantasy. Yet should we succumb to the polarity of so called commonly accepted reality then we are sentenced to an imprisoned deadness and impoverished limitation. It is only when the imagination grounds itself to the realities of things, and the angel and the man wrestle with one another in fierce struggle, that both can be transformed into the innovative, the ingenious and the fantastic. Surely this is what we think of as human creativity and the foundation of art.

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Oh sex what are you but the body’s voice for the souls yearning to be free

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To make great art.
To realize God’s fullest love.
To be kind.
To have the courage to be oneself.

These are one’s truest wishes of fulfillment.

The truth is though that I am distracted by desires of a lesser note and this is the current state of affairs. Regain ones deepest focus without distraction, that is the path.

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Nothings ever as simple as we might wish it to be.

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The ‘music industry’ of current and recent times is populated by demonic and astral entities that are in possession of their ‘hosts’, the ‘music stars’ who are entrapped in glamour. This so called ‘music’ is then disbursed to the entire world populous and those of weak mind and character, who follow the herd, unwittingly succumb to its seductive pull. The strategy behind this ploy is to prevent growth and evolution toward human value and love. It is obvious to one who merely witnesses the phenomena that the enticement of sex, money and a facade of power and bravado is only sad and unfortunate. All these forms of status are mere compensations for the lack of soul of a person they unconsciously have believed they have lost. Compared to the beauty and rapture of music made by a soul who has evolved their resonance with the heart, anything else is at best seen as the cries of children who yearn for purpose, meaning and true love.

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Everything worthwhile in life comes from self-discipline, self-sacrifice and loving devotion. Such so that all other unfulfilled desires which arise and subside in the stream of one’s short existence matter naught.

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Art forming works best where it is conjured through mists of void, reverberating in dimly heard stillness, stayed quicken-ingly in an unknowning and remaining an as not yet dreamed.

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There was a boy, he loved pictures, he loved girls and Jesus loved him. He grew up and he loved art, he loved women and he loved the Master Jesus. Eventually he became all that love. One day he died and he was no more, but only love remained and it was he.

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The entire world, like a painting embedded in stillness – silently moves.

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The words of prayers hold a mystery. They are indeed portals to the divine. Communions between this world and the real world of true love. Poetry, art and music are prayers such as these. As are people, when we let them touch our heart.

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I hope I find your light
In my light
That you find this light
In yours
So we live beyond it all
Within true love
Be it one day
Forever

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“It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.” ― Vincent Van Gough

Dearest Vincent,

It was good to see you today. I have now arrived back home and am reflecting upon our meeting this special day. It was quite a journey to go to you and although costs in transport were somewhat heavy upon the wallet, I have nothing to complain about. Were the several hours journeying, the hour wait in the line to enter and the swarms of persons pushing to and fro, photographing your divine work, their inane babbling and talking sprouting from them…was it worth the voyage to spend an hour and a half to see you and then of necessity, to go back? Please let me answer that.
These painting that bring to my very heart such exquisite joy and happiness pouring forth into one’s soul in their silence and brilliance and beauty, in their sadness and depth of understanding of our world. These paintings and drawings made by such a Saint who lived such an obscure and difficult life who’s very heart was the Holy Spirit. To see works like these it is worth so much more than any little thing.
Upon arriving to where I would be to see your works, I sat outside prior to attending and had some coffee and a little sweet. I sat by some splendid flowers and they called to me. It was gorgeous. As I stayed, a violinist begun his busking and the whole disturbing world turned into such an exquisitely beautiful and romantic unfolding before my very eyes. My heart was truly joyed and it was as if some spirit was bringing this all together in such a meeting.
I cannot speak of your works dear Vincent. They are beyond them. I may only share such gratitude to you to say that they are deeply cherished…I can not speak further…for it does no service to do so. They are beyond them, those small things called words.
Oh Vincent, you always touch the hearts of so many of our lives. I am humbled by you dear one, dear child of the light. Merci. Merci beacoup.

In humble gratitude,
Your brother as well.

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Great ideas can get missed by many and many are the geniuses in our society who are obscure to the world.

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The love in my heart I may express in art. Yet how can I do so in life? Where so much is so far removed from the real as to make it thoroughly un-real.

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Its difficult to love someone and be compassionate at the same time.

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If you love Jesus and then so follow him, you will realize that Jesus is you. It is because of this very real fact that your heart recognizes the truth of him, that he is truth and love. If it were not so then you could not see the truth of him and you would not know and all that Jesus is would seem strange to you. However, you do recognize his truth and ultimate love and therefore this love and truth must be the same as your own very heart. It is so.

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To practice one’s art for the sake of love itself enables one to strengthen in focus with simplicity, grace and beauty. This gives truth to and appreciation of; the gentleness of life.

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After the French lesson that I cannot pronounce; ‘Quand on a pas ce que l’on aime, il faut aimer ce que l’on a”. It is none the less very true and good. Simple food on a wooden table, the wind that blows against the walls and a purposeful life in anonymity all in God’s gracious love is a meaningful blessing indeed.

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Difficult to begin, more difficult to finish. That is good practice.

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Some things I have learned in relation to one’s life purpose, sexuality and the opposite sex; choose a woman that chooses you, if no one – accept it, realise love within. Maintain your priorities and standards, sublimate your energy as well as your sorrow toward the beautiful and the meaningful. Mindfulness of death brings immediacy of life as well as decisiveness. Give the gifts of your personal truth in gratitude, grace and humility as they are truly fulfilling and meaningful in and of themselves. Be independent of mind yet learn always from all. The love of ones task leads to greatness and wonder.

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In working in painting ones building up is often in failure as the ideal sense of what is willed is unattained in its perfect ideal sense of aspiration. Within this there is however the inspiration in its spirit still in constance of reminder and continuance of its infant heart.

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To follow and pursue ones purpose is to overcome all inner trials of the spirit. It is to overturn all obstacles that the soul meets along its path and turns them into her own allies by bringing them into meaning. She knows their intimate sorrows and in so doing reveals their beauty and their wonder; and this is the path of art.

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When you stay with a painting, it begins to stay with you; then it is good thing, when you are kept by it.

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a bird is also a flower; and also freedom

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Learn to allow your brush to be free, varied; ALIVE. Move like the playing of the piano. Fresh, lucid and conscious of composition. How it develops, opens and always transforms in direction. Direction is a way that something takes its course. Allow for the opportunities of diversion; to steer east and curve south then quickly and briefly head north. In this way you never tire and the eye and therefore the mind is continually active and participating. Paint in this way; it is fine indeed.

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Sometimes it is the saddest of lonliness-es, then there are moments of the profoundest of loves in the heart. This is what she means to me; the love of painting.

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Optimism is a three legged cat just looking up at the sky and getting on with her day, without a thought of anything.

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Only love can truly say goodbye and yet always be open in love.

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Only love can ever really be strong enough to truly say goodbye.

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An artist lives a strange relationship with the one they love. They devote the entirety of life to a thing that performs no function. A thing that is of brief dimensions and who’s skin is rough and course. An object that lacks desired feminine traits, that is unadorned and without curves or softness. Yes, there is often conversation, fighting too but for what? There is obviously no sensual gratification that may ever take place and the thing has no apparent feelings of its own. It relishes of course in being adored and made immortal but the one who is so devoted to it in heart lives in isolated solitude with thoughts and imaginings sacrificed all for its glory, its divinity. Such stirrings burn the feelings and longing torments the heart and mind. The object of adoration knows nothing of it and need it even? A strange relationship indeed and a very sad and deprived one at that. Yet knowing in the heart of hearts that it is all entirely worth it and by the end of day, the night is cool upon the breath of the artist who can only wander alone with the love for the work and the wonder of the beauty continually dancing all round.

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Remember the right amount of openness and closedness. loose yet at once; refined bodily freeness of your soul.

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The point is not to continually repeat the mythological image. The essential part is to re-appropriate myth in meaningful ways toward our modern conditions, without losing the sacred dignity of the past through disrespectful ignorance. It requires thoughtful endevor but it is possible, if we are sensitive and intelligently innovative.

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After the day, the heart shows itself like the moon rises from the dark.

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In love and beauty, in women; choose love before morals. Love holds its own ethics. So be without hesitation only.

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One eve beauty I shall find you in the clear. Then shall we dance the joy of love true.

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Scribe, inscribe your heart upon the wall
Write the picture of the unspoken form
The devotion of love to the craft that all guild bearers wear
Walk with them, sit with them, look and see with them
Your brothers, your sisters, your lovers; all divine saints
deeply whisper their part with them and with them belong
The entryway is by carving with hand and claw
Continual traces of past like a fountain of blue beckoning forth
Ones very living breath and essence of mind; the work
The spirit evaporates throughout it all
All that is needed its to put your unique self into it
The qualities and virtue of your being
This is why you cultivate and practice so
To give to the world and to give

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I see not through the eyes, but through the mind and paint not just by hands, but by the heart. Thereby a painting speaks through silent words and dances in singing stillness from within.

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May great fear arise within you, as soon as a familiar habit sets in, a repeated known pattern that does not branch or grow. Have you not noticed with your eyes, that all life is in the ‘ever change’ and that this idea called creation is so always a-shaking and a-trembling? Your making is too like this, aligned in this way, for what is art but the adoration of life itself which is a livened thing. When your working becomes static, engrained in its habitual technicality, then it is only a dead thing, or more than this, for even a dead thing is a state of decomposing. Life you know is like the lightning in the sky. It is such a spark of the splitting of the emptiness of the air and water of the very substances of this human realm. So be like in this when you are in devotion to that which you adore in the very substance of your soul. Be alive in that. To the rest of everything else, you’re already dead so it matters not but only that you live in life in your love.

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I like to walk back after painting at night and look at the trees and the love that I lost and be with the unknowable life in devotion, a Bhakti of love to the love of the night and the rest of it all in the heart of all beauty and of all feeling and sense.

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Your starry night,
Above Away
Each a-drop already gone
Like tears self-emptying
Your skin-light sky
An infinitude of sad and wish
To your multiplied I fly
To paint your face

Pursuing such dark eye
Before you’ve reached my eye
Your surfaces of light already gone
Even touched not yet have we
Yet you sing and shine before me, but before me
Calling light
I cry your cry

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between that outside place

and the inside room

lay a window right above my head

and there, in the frost upon it – lay a world

the sky of which, wore its ground, its crown

so that by the light – that laden world become

of which shone through right

and straight way in

to you

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In dedicated practice comes depth. No need to look for it elsewhere. Its on the other side of all ones resistance to simple, whole-hearted, concentrated and meaningful work and beauty is her handmaiden.

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I want the imagery to be such a kind of worked build up of paint, not for its own sake but that it brings about in itself an almost liquefaction and reification of the very sense of sensation itself. One that fractures, fragments, breaks apart, solidifies, and renders anew the sensation of ones and of ours – existence of being.

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It is a relief to the feelings when one comes to an authentic and genuine expression of ones self, rather than an imitation of some work that was originally set into motion and realised slowly as unsatisfactory to an honest goings on of the psyche. Still, the tendency is to continue in a vein already known and so there is a retracing and undoing, a criticism always at odds with the creation and yet of course, making it honest as well as a learning to be of ones own making. It is this drive which is essential in the art process. An unpleasant criticalness yet crucial. It is the only way, by going into and through a style and the perpetuating styles which emerge, each cliche after the other, until, one trusts and endeavors, shall push through to a new thing.

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The stained formations of bright brown daffodils floating within the interior walls of the empty coffee cup. O those are the yearning poems and that is the real in painting and that is the dream of art.

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You are still trying to think of the object, to make it too soon a thing and are therefore finding it a difficult struggle to bring any thing into formation, or at least a satisfying creation. The head becomes too narrow focused and thereby narrows its natural allowance of full and complete flow. Learn then the interchangeable practice of formation and freedom in creative making. The form of the poem needs to be open and then to form and then to open again in a continual ebb and flow and dance. The mind and imagination is free, trust its capacity to entwine its understanding with the visual phenomena and the unconscious sensation at work within its living memory. As understanding clarifies then the tendency is to close in on that and make it too readily a thing too soon. Birth takes time to become so understand and follow that natural practice. Watch out too for the need to follow another too closely. Your own aesthetic sensibility has its own voice to be known. It’s tempting to give way to anothers path and solution, but you know in yourself that you thereby underestimate your truest sense of origins. Learn in time to trust the creativity of your soul and mind and it shall show and reveal to you that wonder and splendour of its own nature and enchantment.

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When the soul gathers to itself the body of your church, it brings together in worship of you all the broken members of your limbs upon that cross and you appear in your passion and the spear is thrust and water pours, your flesh is living and is breath and those who have always served thee in all their imperfect yet adorable ways, too beautiful to imagine are so too gathered at your table and with you we dwell and are nourished by the work done and done with thee, by thy hands that give yourself to us and so that we may serve the world for you and with this art and so this is the living word, each image of your face in all of us, your hands that reach to us so closely and are held by yours in works of kindness that are formed, each one the living word which gives us life, each a confession, a witness of your holy spirit, A wonderous rapture with you, lost in devotional prayer with you, each one a kiss upon your bleeding feet O Lord our Jesus the Christ.

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Take time and learn to listen to your work rather than always talking and filling it with ideas and imagery. The images come forth but not as you think or in fact can imagine. They are always within you and are given, not made directly by you. You only need call them forth, dear friend.

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That curious place where the world seems unreal
And the child wanders in the garden
Where all moment is the echoing memory
In the place where obvious dreams speak unspoken words
Here nothing is real but so real, the evocation of images
The conjuring of gentle whispers upon the scent of the season
Is this what is spoken of, of what you and they call it,
love?

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Art shows and brings back that which the psyche pulls away from. It may be either good or bad, beautiful or repulsive. It may nourish the soul or it can also be like a strange kind of poison like wine is both flavorsome, intoxicating and yet there is some kind of delirious pleasure of and from the mind. It is the poetry of a soul in transgression of itself. The binding of the unruly imagination who’s task it is to rope itself in worship and service of God. The physicality of brush, the representation of sensuality and sensation and invocation of paint and bodily intent. This soul is no disciplined mystic and a poor spiritual student. This soul is but a lonely, idolatrous artist for the Lord.

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As an artist, sometimes it feels as if one is offering a lovely bouquet of flowers to a highway of screaming vehicles that can in no way even notice them, let alone take a moment to smell their fragrance. One deeply desires to show their work, there is a wish to communicate this expression of being, and yet I personally am at a perpetual loss as to how to do this in a way that is appreciated. A flower is appreciated not by saying look at me, come close to me, see how wonderful I am. It simply grows and blossoms and then fades back into the earth or is blown away into the wind. It takes one who can come to it while it is in bloom to purchase and keep it in care and then give it as a gift for many to see and to absorb.

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God or bad, right or wrong; it’s the people with life whom we love.

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The painting of the body is the felt sense of the body. The metacognitive awareness of the unknown and yet not unfamiliar known-ness of tangible yet subtle sense. Paint is just like this as it can allude to; through texture, malleability, colour and movement, the various spaces the mind/soul opens in through. Body shapes the shifting boundary of world and otherness with that of individuated being.
The questioning of what is, of whence from is one and where; this enquiry without precedent yet motivated by existential being…although there is a growing certainty there is mind only and that this is the mind of God, the body is a realm of this mind, as is this individuated soul and art keeps balance and check and brings one back to the whole of it all. This too is the beautiful.

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There can at times be great inertia and conflict of soul as a work day in painting comes in to be. The agonising is not strictly an outworn cliche. For whatever reason the gravity of is like a tearing apart from the atmosphere and is even felt somatically in some sense as well as emotionally. A good cure for the dissatisfaction and agitated sensitivity; is a short sleep that revitalises both mind and body and clears the debris of previous days so that as the side of the world one stands upon cools and the energy of the moon comes into full and happy play. One rolls with the seasons and the turning of the world and by the night’s night, after work enough, rests a contented spirit.

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If things are only integrated, then there is nothing that gets created from the scource of the one building and making. This is important if one values real originality and wishes to continue a tradition of creativity.

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When making, bring into being that which lays with such soft touch upon the edges of the imaginative sense; desiring to be known. They are but gentle reminders of the worlds to come.

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When one seeks out that which is meaningful, the endeavor returns always to that presence of encompassing love that is at once both truly meaningful and way beyond such as meaning may entail. It may be said that it is the meaningful that can only point towards, that suggests, that love; in sign, in deed and in thoughtful feeling.

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Surely it is in error to assume that values only arise when external conditions co-exist. We see examples in many fields that illustrate the anticipation of future and radical views of life and the world, generated via ideas alone.

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Last week was nice because when I was painting the people who take the garbage out came. They are a really nice and friendly family. The man waves and says hello to me when we see each other. He brings his children and this time his girlfriend came too. The little girl who is the daughter of the man was with the girlfriend. The little girl was commenting on my work…’too dark!’ She said…well…everyone’s a critic! The amazing thing is thT this girl was three years of age and she was able to easily recognise the elements and imagery hidden in the painting. I was really impressed. She also saw a tiger…which I didn’t remember putting in there…but still…pretty awesome that this child was able to recognise something not easily picked up by adults…at least in my general experience. We got her to do some painting on a canvas that I had and she really took off…great painting arm…a real artist and so sweet! I gave her a brush for free and she told me she will come back and show me her amazing artworks…I simply can’t wait.

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From now on I worship Seurat. This work among many other great art works, I saw today. I learned from this. Ones mind can continually weave and follow the many patterns embedded in the image that is constructed; a simple field. The combinations of colours are surprising and the inter-relationships of colour outweigh even Monet. Seurat had an exquisite mind.

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I dont want what is real. I dont like what is real. I want what is un-real. I like what is behind the real. The Real of the real. Like looking through a window or a world that exists and lives, held behind a picture frame.

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Much can be learned simply by discarding books and relying upon the thinking that enters ones mind when in silent contemplation. On learns not only in the doing and the listening but also most reason can be obtained via the thoughts that are conjured just from the mind in its freest state.

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Think. Consider more deeply, more courteously what the image that entered your consciousness really represents. Think about this before you judge and decide to erase these ideas in your work. Trust the mind, it has an intelligence that is not your own. Listen to that and walk with it at times as a close friend and at other times, as a student walks with their master.

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What quality can always be said to be virtuous in every single circumstance? One learns over time, that kindness is not always a virtue. Or rather that kindness can show its face in forms contrary to normal expectations and immediate happiness. Is there fear in this? A trembling? The unknown can be somewhat disconcerting.

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The truly kind do not realize they are kind.

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I have been thinking about gaining recognition in art, wether or not to and how to, go about doing so. There is considerable ignorance about how to attain such recognition and is something all artists must struggle with. There are various choices one makes along the way in this journey, markers along the path that determine much of the future indeed. One such decision is in what to make and why one makes it. Who and what, in persons and in principles, one makes it for. The future is always thought about and taken into account.
Other such factors to consider are models to follow and to align with, philosophical as well as artistic. A major factor to follow is one of strategy. I have tried a few approaches and to no avail. Of course, process and results do not always appear to follow one another as immediate cause and effect.
I have also seriously considered simply not wasting my attention on such matters. This was a beautiful signal yesterday to my heart as to what is truly important and what can be easily missed out. I was walking to the underground car park where I currently make my paintings and as I was walking by the houses there was a couple with their little daughter looking at a vacant block of land all covered up by construction fencing. The little girl was asking those sweet children’s questions that are always so wonderous at their innocent remark ability. I felt ashamed at my intense covetous obsessional thinking about how to achieve my goal as what was being pointed out to me was so much more than anything ‘attainable’ by worldly standards.
It is this place that art, what I might consider true art, comes from. This place that can’t be attained by skill or strategy or Fortuna. This is what can be easily missed and what is of overwhelming importance. The material success and the benefits they would provide for making art can be helpful, yet it requires right means as well as right intentions. For the enlightenment of truth, for our realizing this throughout history. Not for self-centred gain.
Even still, other things to consider are also important. It is easy to allow for excuse making by using the source of art the be all and end all of the whole project and not then taking action to actualise ones potential in the world. I recognise a trait and a drive for recognition. It is there and it’s a strong one because of what is felt as ones true potential. Even though I currently, along with all the other artists, am standing in the darkened dark as to how to gain this strongly sought after recognition.
There is still much to consider and to research and reflect upon. There are different ways to try and see. I am learning about some form of intelligent guidance that shows and points out what I’m ready to see at any given time. It is my own mind showing me a closer brush with true nature, ultimately. It is in finding the middle way in crossing the stream to get to the other side, as the Buddhist saying goes. Not too much, nor too little effort, but the right effort.

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Sometimes out of the mess of a work, the chaos and the murkiness of it all, something is seen and the cat leaps.

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With creativity, it is uncanny how one idea leads to the association of another one that reaches beyond some limit one was under sway from. A whole new fertile land opens up underneath ones very feet. Such can be the nature of mind when absorbed in pure fascination of the sensation that is tasted with ones eyes and felt within ones hearing, heard from ones feeling and smelt of its potency from ones insatiable lust. It is even such that a bad idea or outcome of an experiment or attempt can cause rise to a good one and of course, vice a versa.

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Seeing previous work beside one currently in making, looking at the way the globules of paint form and the imagery that can rise, the realms of emotional intensity that can formulate. A particular aesthetic equipped to such a burden held tightly to. Conjured before one are spawning patterns from Dante and the trembling carried in wake of Mozart’s Requiem all held in place by the point of mans egoic condition.

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Catching the train home, just as I was departing at my stop I noticed the different people and one person, a lady who one would simply not recognize had such a lovely and adorable soul. I just saw her for a brief moment. Someone who would just be so apparently ordinary in life. It was like the soul of ‘her’ could or was just jumping and being seen for a moment and she was so adorable. I wonder if our art can really show that. The soul and beauty of another that is ordinarily so invisible. I hope so.

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Art needs to show and connect with what we are in essence as human being. To understand the strength of the solitude-ional painter; self-knowing via reflection, one may intuit and infer the heart of another. Exercising to the best one might, compassion for other allows the bridging the abyss that is the deluded obscuration that appears to exist. Have honesty. Have some humility, however false that may be. Forgive your self judgement. You find your common humanity through the heart. You are not really any different than anyone else at the core and with understanding you join in with the human suffering, our attempts to avoid it and the yearning for the contented spirit.

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Painting is not really, as the present day word of ‘cool’; meaning: good and approved of in contemporary life. It does not really fit in to this type of world. These present worlds of transitory desires that capture the body-mind by flashing images and excitatory sounds that entrain the memory in reptitive and highly simplisic patterns are a way of hypnotizing the mass of the populous into a chemical ‘drug’ dependant condition which utilizes the anaimalistic reptillian brain into patterns of desire and mimetic rivalry. It is not in and of itself a bad or negative thing, but one simply needs to see it as it is. One gets caught up in these desires as they are programs that entrain the brain into these models of wants. The desires form for multiple reasons such as psycho-physical-developmental compensations as well as the natural functioning of a human being. As the philosopher, Rene Girard often states, mimetic desire is something that is unavoidable. We can however, follow models that lead us to more opportunities to avoid the escalation to extremes as a result that mimetic rivalry leads to. These models are ones such as the life of Jesus. Of course, this has its own problems as well, for models are interpreted. It has been helpful to be reminded by my teacher, that Christ Consciousness is a Being that is not so much replicated or emulated, but manifested through Spirit.
That painting is not ‘cool’ is not to say that it ought not to be done in our times, or that it is out-dated. Art has been with us since the beginning of our species and is an output of the minds requirement for meaning. So the question that is put to artists of today is two-fold. How does one hold and operate mimetic rivarly that is essentially unavoidable, while cultivating ones character so that their work is really coming from a place of quality and goodness? The second is, what constitutes meaning and beauty for this period of history and what really is it that human being is now grasping as symbolic representation for that meaning?
Personally I am learning about the desires that I become caught in and how they form and influence my mind, emotions, behavior and perceptions. I find that desires quickly become simply like ridiculous monsters that grow out of proportion to any real life, especially the life of a simple soul with little material offering. It’s these disproportionate yearnings that are simply not going to be actualized in my own life, as they demand to my mind they be, that rather than getting stuck into nurotic yearnings, allows me to channel this desire into art. They do help form a present day modality of art form and can also inspire ones life. Sensuality and beauty is inspiring and one may integrate these qualities for the good and not for the gross.

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Honesty is both a curse and also the cure.

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Often it is the case that one is in a felt literal sense, swimming in a multitude of relative desires that (when returning to one’s inner centre and also through one’s real work) are realized as distractions and mirages that obscure the truth of what is most real to ones true purpose. When feeling into these currents of moving desires the quality of the soul deepens and a more genuine contentedness, natural fullness of love and clearer purpose holds one. The Will too may be more readily channelled and directed. This is at least the intuited realization. Becoming that and learning from the actions one takes in the world, is more of a process that can take time.

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Remember the early cave painters and the power of their images and signs. Dont lose touch with the origin of this art and the mystery it has continued to show us.

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Where does meaning begin? It begins towards the end. when our background functioning occurs within it a contradictory element, it becomes apparent and cries out to us for a resolution, one that is not as yet available from its inate style of being. Therefore a new style is needed to be made. That style is seen to ‘work’ when it contains within it a sense of completeness, however much it may be differentiated and juxtaposed from the previous system. It becomes its own style in itself. Quite very different from its predecessor.

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Do what works, not what doesnt work – unless it is meaningful, then do that.

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Ultimately, what works hinges upon the meaning we attach to anything we engage in. The definition of madness is not doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Madness is doing anything without any meaning behind it. Once you know this, then look around you and tell me who is the mad one?

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Beauty flies high in the sky, but on the ground – one thing just always eats another.

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Learn to be gentle, delicate, subtle. Let things build up slowly over time, tentatively. The piano is played with such precise instrumentality. It is both delicate and can work into the most intense and powerful emotions. Beauty is not typically harsh, unless it is nature herself. Human beauty is refined, it is geometric. Implied, not overtly stated. Learn from the landscapes of Renoir. These works are greatly overlooked. Soften your brushes, mute your colours and do not apply too much too soon. Do not just feel but think, when you touch.

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I have found it to be the case, and always it is remarkable to me, the particular kind of people that really understand what painting is. They are not academic historians or philosophers, nor are they painters. They are not ordinary everyday people who play sports and go out partying either. They are people whos occupation involves both thinking as well as physical skill. They are always either medical surgeons or tradespeople. People who understand the practical complexities of physical navigation and chaotic systems that require a manual hands on approach while also having to master thinking in both concrete and abstract pathways. I am always surprized at their intelligence and their aptitude in understanding painting so precisely and so spot on. They know what painting is, because they have the capacity to imagine potential possibilities as well as relate to visual materiality and bodily movement/felt-navigation. Other intelligent kinds of people can appreciate painting, but not ordinarily in the way people who practice a manual thinking skill or trade do. There are always great exceptions of course, but it is remarkable and surprising to my mind none the less.

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Want to visit heaven?
Travel in the memories of love.

Yet if you stay in those places of rememberance,
They shall turn to chasms of hell.

The only way of escape is thus: to see love as always always.

I found joy when I realized myself as love.
I found truth when love lived me.

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My mind is hijacked by one seductive idea after the other, yet it is the one that you find you have fallen in love with is the one that endures. The others become a part of that important one.
The ideas and thoughts of the mind are like beautiful women and one feels enchanted and desirous in possessing them. Wishing for them to take you overboard and lead you even to ruin all for the sake of loving them. One needs ideas like one needs women. For inspiring and giving life to the birth of the new.
One requires their captivating intoxication, their bewildering insanity; even if only so as to feel more as a friend with ones own madness and folly.

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…must remember to develop the tonalities of the various hues of grey in combination with the field effect of the ground in the painting. All colour is ghastly and overbearing otherwise.

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Love continues, even after you’re gone.

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Emotions can be hot, strong, powerful and intense but beauty is slightly cooler, well tempered and sustained in time, through the heart.

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Chopin is the closest to love. One can cherish Chopin.

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Memories make strange bedfellows.

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Sometimes there are moments where one feels so much all at once, other times there appears to be an incredible numbness where no feelings exist in space. Sometimes you want to feel, to intensely feel. Then there are time when one wishes to feel absolutely nothing at all. In between it all, one deeply appreciates the ordinary.

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We pick up on so much of our environment that we are unaware of. So much effects us in various ways. Observing ones imagionation reveals our humanistic osmosistic capacities.

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I wish but to be in stillness, to remain just in the love of the heart and in the thoughts, the recollections of you. I used to have one to tell these words to and you would understand them. Now this too is passed and for the time remaining there are but pictures without words to speak and sing from. If others care to hear their stories and walk in their friendship then may they be their guest and companion. I shall for my part stay only always still, just like a portrait of Madame Cezanne, lovingly contemplating the gift you brought, of love, of you.

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Thought of as a whole, species thrive with groups of variation. This variation allows more possible adaptations to environmental changes. So if you think about it this explains why vegetarians, and artists, still exist even today.

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Perhaps it be best just to pursue sexual amore. Intimate, committed relations tend to leave me rejected, and also rejecting too, whereas sex with a sensitive and open heart is more apt to flow most naturally, for my own circumstances. I suppose Id be happy either way..

…of course with love, love has its own truth.

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Why is Andy Warhol so disturbing? Because people think that origionality really exists. Warhol is just so obvious in what he says, so ‘as it is’. Origionality is a questionable idea. In one sense, yes it is a correct idea, new things do arise. They form from imitation of the old. They are mimetic replicas with variant properties, thus they appear to be differentiated. Humans are the same and this is a part of our dilemma – but that’s another story. What I wish to think of tonight is that it is expected for art to be new and origional. An artist is meant to be them and no one else. This is in part correct. One’s unique self does come through in your work, certainly. Especially once the basics of drawing are mastered. There is though an even more pertinent note that is neglected by people who look at art. To get to the point, there is a real requirement to periods of discipleship that artists undergo in their development of their work. Mozart did this very late in his career with his emulation of Bach. Gorky also is known for his dedication to Picasso. One has their own masters to whom one is a real student of. It is certainly at times a fine line between where one decides to leave as a point of departure. It is a tricky situation as one may even be overcome with admiration of the one who so much is indebted to. It is a process that is not unlike attachment in childhood. What I would say is, dont be too concerned with others views of you as being too imitative. As long as you can find yourself through it, it shows that you are on the right path to creating something that is truly and uniquely your own, only you have gone the way of all those masters before you, in a genuine discipleship.

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It is always a curious endeavor when a work you had been thinking about and questioning over for such a time in your mind starts to be actually made into material form. From absorbing so much of life around you, walking the world at different times and especially the night walks toward love. Even though the space in between had been filled with such a sorrow, and still…the work continued its birthing from within, it is still a great marvel to bring it about into the world., just to watch it come to be. To concern oneself even still of its becoming, the composition, the way the colours ought to form, the enduring critical necessity and those wild moments of pure passion and spontaneous freedom. It is only just love existing, as it is.

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An image is always a primal thing. Words come after but thinking can open the way to new metaphorical analogies that can help us to reach into something ‘other’ than an already known paradigm.

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This morn, the moon sat upon my left shoulder, the sun rested on my right. My heart dreams near my centre and the waterfall within cleanses the sorrow of lost love.

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Can one feel a thought? Does not not always do so?

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My eyes are a thief that steals all thing it looks in desire upon.

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I think that the cultivation of compassion and compassionate action in the ethical way most suited to your bio-psycho-social nature does allow grace to flow with ones artistic creation. What you make expresses in a great degree, who and what you are. Your nature shows in the work and the qualities you express in your work are shown more readily and authentically, when they are practiced and lived as much as possible.

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Yesterday was an important point I think; in consideration of ones artistic direction. Still much reflection is needed however. A friend and art collector who admires and appreciates the artworks and who came to see my work raised an important point to me regarding the work. That is in advancing through into newer territory, that important elements can be lost – especially the human element and the personal element. It can be lost in the pursuit of technical mastery and advancement. also that we can be blind to certain aspects in our work that is not really as sophisticated as we may have suspected. Simple basics can get lost and forgotten in the ever expanding development and ‘expertise’ of the practicioner/artist. It is difficult to be given criticism on something we feel so sure in ourselves about, but it is so important to get perspectives from others from angles that we dont look through or have neglected to do so. I am grateful for this.

An additional reflection: One needs to have the teeth to come to terms with others rejection of a style, there can also be good points to their differences and it can be wise to take these into account and adjust – while maintaining your approach. See it through. Develop it well. It is like holding a sail to the shifting currents of the winds. Listen to the views of others you consider worthwhile listening to. Those whose views are anterior to your own also consider if there is something in them. Ultimately an artist in their direction must come to their own conclusions and decisions. You also trust your insight of the idea that is the impulse of the particular approach you are advancing. You learn from others and you find your own authentic and unique truth through practice. There is no other way but to persist in practice, utilizing good reflection and seeking grace in all things of life.

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We tend to to see things in terms of a functional human system regarding human life experience. The question that goes against this in my mind is what is it to consider and prioritze a meaningful existence, however transitory and painful that may be. This makes me rethink ethical views about things like suicide and how a basic assumption that is perhaps quite incorrect, shapes and finalizes our understanding of such a thing. The importance then, is to have a continual openness as well as a sense of uncertainty and oubt that allows for this openness. The general principle is that certainty has a tendency to close off and uncertainty to open and explore. These two principles, in right proportion to one another, make up what we call a sense of the beautiful.

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As art is as much a form of a primal language, the question of the origin of language is fascinating to us for a distinctly important reason, however the question itself is displaced, or rather it is the assumption of the question that is misguided. The reason for this is that the question is oriented towards an expectation that is of an internal and external objective nature as well as some relationship to subjective symbolism and inter objective script; ie, the symbol only and ignores what can be termed as the primary perspective of communication itself. This is the real question of the origin of language. This view is as much primal as both ultimate subjective and ultimate objective realism and this is what lends fuel to the enquiry as it is part of the primary ontological ground of being. What is ‘it’, what is this ‘I’ and from whence is this ‘we’?

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The most wonderful thing and the most terrible thing, is love.

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Ideas as well as images, might be wonderfully interesting and can be absorbing, even exilerating but if they do not endure or deepen then they must ultimately be of less value and power.

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Abstract Impressionism; it is the sensual recollection of the impressions of the environment. Sounds, textures, the elements and also of course, light and colour. The focus of these particulars and the formulation of these as they are built and digested into the mind and memory. The artifact then made is purposed and built in a way that can encapsulate the gestalt sense impressions. It excludes a reliance upon a literalism of any one particular perceived environment (for example, an every day landscape constructed upon formal rules, so as to pertain to a pre or already known recognizability). The body can also be incorporated, especially in a way that represents the way these impressions are internalized in a bodily way within.

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Like life, the art work needs to say nothing direct or obvious. Muted, nothing distinct, certain or prominent. Yet it must only suggest indirectly, to hint at a possibility of a response from the initial un-verbalized question. Then, at the same time, so much is said in such complexity and with such overwhelming sensation. This is the difficult and needed task of the art of life.

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The beginning of art is the beginning of language, but surely there is no origin of language in itself. Individual entities perform communicative functions down to electrons, do they not? Then an origin of language must be clarified as to what form of language that is. One would expect then that, as per a quadrantal model might predict, language would show up as various expressions along a developmental line. For example, genetic communicatory systems would show prior to animal forms of communication, such as marking territory for instance. In humans then the question becomes more complex as symbolic cognition becomes a prominent requirement to formal sign systems, or so it is generally surmised.

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In between the unanswered question of life and death, did spark awake the fire of curiosity and the imagination was born.

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An artist allows a new energy to enter their being for the expiration of a work. It is the working of this energy, through the heart and mind that is a participatory vehicle of the creation.

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Sainthood does not occur only from prayer or the intention to be good. It does not happen from meditating or a response only from the surrounding conditions and environment, be they peaceful or hostile. It is not bestowed by a teacher or a teaching. It is not a combination of these factors either that induces the character into such a disposition, or it is not only from the combinatory influences of the above factors. Sainthood is never really decided upon by the individual and nor is it disposed upon by a higher force. Saints are adversaries to their own condition. In addition, they are ones who, I believe, recognize an innate and strong violence in themselves and it is in this recognition that all else occurs; the prayer, the grace and the response to external factors. It is really then a biological and organic response of an evolutionary nature, just as much as it is mystical as well as pragmatic in resolution. This is a pondering upon and no claim to the disposition. I do find life quite difficult…but we are all in the same boat with that one.

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I think I can understand how Jesus talked. I think that ‘the word’ spoke through him as the word represents the gestalt, the overall history of mankind and the language Jesus used; the analogical and metaphorical signs and connotations reflected the disposition of his intellect. It thought in dream like wholes, symbolical representations that encapsulate and link to a variety of contexts and associated references yet at the same time precisely delineating the meanings of these references. He effectively addressed both temporal structural history as well as referencing spiritual ideas relevant to enlightenment.
This is really how images themselves work and operate in the mind. They are complete pictures and representations of things that go beyond, and are greater than the limitations of specific content. Thus can paintings speak and continue to commune via wholes, rather than only through specifics. They are like keys that open portals to various dimensions, rather than being only specific aspects of those dimensions in any particular way. It is like the theme and mood vs the story and characters.

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Ah, I think I see how I am destined to disappear ‘behind ones work’. That being the need for recognition itself. To live in contentment to do ones work in life and to advance the front as an unknown ‘soldier’ so to speak. Unpretentiously unseen. Trusting that what is truly needed shall come through. Feels appropriate here and now.

Listen to this guidance from within.

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The mind is naturally brilliant when it is free, yet ultimately powerless if un-channelled.

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Every day, observe a little of nature. Make sure you never lose an appreciation for the genius orange turned leaves resting upon a wintered tree or the smoky mists which drift from mouths of human folk.

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Typically we treat people as machines (nowadays as computers) and these machines as human beings. The denial and absence of feeling toward the other and self justified belief is the beginning of all unethical actions. Defenses are part of the personality, and often need to be unloaded or allowed to burn off, but be cautious off the absence of the felt sense for other life. Especially now with the over-emphasis of the technological and the economic.
It can be revelatory to recall that our social systems, especially roles relative to employment tasks are often greatly suppressive and in no way represent most humans basic capacity, intelligence and creative potential. They can however in the reverse way, dramatically inflate a false superiority and inferiority upon human social relations. This, combined with our current relative-ized and economically rationalized educational standards offers a disturbing image of future normative ‘functioning’.
In other words, when a person can learn to recognize their own natural inclinations and abilities, they can find their own way through and beyond the confines of their given historical, economic and cultural limitations. An artist who needs to support themselves in a responsible way needs to do this, as does any person who is determined to achieve greatness and their true potential.

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Clouds seem to have moved so abruptly from one glance to the next, yet their actual speed is virtually unrecognizable. Why is this? The reason is they move their whole complex structure all at once, yet retain the ghost of their previous shape. They thereby appear to be unmoving yet continually transfiguring both at the same time.

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Another tragedy, another triumph; breakthroughs always come right at the end, when all your frontlines, all your defense is exhausted and either stalemate or defeat seems inevitable. Something yet continues inside after it’s time to stop. Something new comes through and there is a little victory for a short time. These little victories are remembered. These small decisive breakthroughs eventually win us the war.
Still, I chide myself again and again when I fall prey to my own worst enemy. It is not the artist that works with the visions she or he has. It is vision that impedes the artist, by this I mean working from a complete and specific idea or an ideal. The artist is not the maker of these dead forms, ever. The artist is first and foremost n experimenter. A mimic and imitator not of the representations at play of the mind, but an imitator of the greatest scientist of all, life. The maker, the tinkerer who tinkers away while half dreaming and lands upon an accident an ‘ocurrance’ that moves the dream towards a particular, un-referencible destination.
An artist is not a visionary or an ideal image-maker. This approach leads only to bad art, lifeless for it does not follow life. It is a great mistake to start off with the dream and try to finish from there. Einstein was a prolific scientist but a terrible artist from my point of view; because he envisioned a truth and proved it through an ideal, through mathematics. This is not the way of art or alchemy, although both are science and in the best of sense. We artists do not put the pre-concluded hypothesis before the experiment. We place play prior to any conclusion. And play it is, ipso facto in all respects. I oppose Eienstien and I replace him with the greatest experimenters of all. The ones I admire are the ones who created a new dawn. They were true gods, the ones who discovered fire. The earliest scientists. The experimenters.

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Life’s got to be pretty good to feel content enough to complain about it but sour grapes are requisite for the potions of Bacchus.

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How were you born? I asked

I jumped from the dawn of the sky and plunged into the earth not fully solid. Through this i flew out into a velvet green void and stayed a little while there. Then I returned from whence I came through and crystalized my essential bones so as to seprate my being into a series. I became a sequence and was formulated into number and codified therefore all future and past events in time and space.

Hmmm…how imaginative to dream up your story in such a way. How should we know that it is true? I asked my friend…

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The species of human is like a composed fugue; variations on a theme.

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An artist spends a long time in search of a world. Till one day they find it, step inside of it and disappear into the background behind it.

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creativity is what occurs absolutely spontaneously when the mind is open to resolve problems beyond its current capacity. Some people call it ‘dreaming’.

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‘The Night Train’ a story about the life of a train; the events of the people who are like symbiotic entities that exist temporarily within the being of the train. The train as a living creature that witnesses via surveillance. It must decide upon when to close its doors to the things that scramble towards it, fall asleep on it, trash it, jump in front of it. Things that exist only to move in and out of it each day. Like peculiar alien entities. The train that thinks silently, watching its inhabitants. The train that sometimes screams. A bizzare exisitential question that carries unintelligable beings upon it. What is this non-commenting living train and the stories that house its existence?

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If you have ever attempted to listen to the words spoken in a language you understand, soley as phonetic sounds you would immediately recognize the impossibility of such a task. How then can it be refuted without justification that our empirical experience by a background of any phenomena is not interpreted and fundamentally conditioned by our semantic reference? Do we not see then that a poetic radicalization of our semantic ground is primary in opening up to any pre-conceived vision?
Alternatively, and upon greater reflection; perhaps semantics is required for knowing some things, but not others. I recently heard of an experiment that consisted of a certain group of people who had limited vocabulary for the variations in colours. Yet they were able to match colours they did not have a name for in their language system. Well then, let us say that language is at best a tool and a basic means of discerning various phenomenological experiences but it is not the sole method, at least not in the way commonly thought of as linguistic usages. We need to think of language in a more generalized way first, that of communication between one thing and another. How do things communicate with themselves, if things are differentiated at all? How does mind come to know phenomena distinctly? In what ways does image making then, form our most basic aspects of perception, understanding, seeing and ‘knowing’ things? Language is something that stands in for another thing, as a representation of that thing, but not the thing itself. If things can be discerned and differentiated without the use of a sign system initially then language must therefore come after the comprehension of the thing, presumably. Language is perhaps a way of closing a thing down, into a particular commodification of itself. When we transgress language, via then that form that was once solidified, breaks open again into a new possibility. Language then has a secondary power, one that is able to perform magic, as a kind of a spell or an enchantment can cause a conjuring of something else that returns us back to that dark place of the unknown once again. That darkness brings both fear as well as possibility and in this there is an ultimate comfort and a kind of rest-full restlessness that is all at once both the alpha and the omega of infinity.

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I wonder what the inner life of Jesus of Nazareth might have been like?

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Unlike others who are fast in their understanding of things, I dont see things so fast as them. I do not comprehend things so quickly. This is what is behind being a thoughtful person. I am questioning because I am so gullible.

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When we think of human potential, we do not normally consider the capacity to love. It is this quality however that is truly an exceptional and under-looked potential. We think of intelligence, strength, leadership, talent and skill, but not love. This capacity and it is one as it can be extended and also requires development, growth and maturity. It is noticeable as well, that it is capable of quite easily being magnanimous and I think that it has an intelligence itself.

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Although, for in one sense – evolutionary purposes, a traditional artist uses their hands in the practice of their alchemical craft; one does admire a school child utilizing their computer on a train, that uses a program that is able to magnify a multitude of documented stars and solar systems at the glide of ones fingertip. Enjoyably remarkable as a minute before this mind was contemplating how the temporal distances of spaces appear virtually unreachable, when there is the sense of distance. What is this sense of distance and is distance now a phenomena quickly passing into its own horizon?

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Genius is the expanded intensity of concentration. Once the mind is trained in concentration, only devotion from the heart can can ‘stay with’, endure and extend through that concentration of ones mind. That is my experience. I infer also that it is the primacy of the essence of -what is- that is the source of that love. The deepening of mind seems to be both the unfolding of awareness moving back and the focusing of mind, moving back and forth, oscillating as an equalibrium. Then it is as if one intuits ones internal compass and senses the appropriate dropping into the shifting states of that awareness. Getting used to this is like becoming familiar with it. To help oneself to understand the process.

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Time, always with the thought of hostility
You are over and gone before you even begin
In its place remains what? A vanished friend.

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One does not need to be a religious,
To feel righteous in murder.

One need not be a materialist,
To exterminate in the name of ones superior race.

Nor be a Communist,
To justify the means to the end

Not a Capitalist,
To quash your neighbor

Not a civilized man,
To conquer a savage race.

One need only to belong,
To the human species.

One need only to be human to belong to the human race,
And nothing more is required either,

To be humane.

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Sitting still

Things move oh,

Quite so quickly.

So still, sit.

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Something quite deep just occurred. Who knows what it is? In ones personal soul, begun by a cherished memory, or in the world…just feeling this now. Wonder of this..and thought to write it down.

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I love you my Jesus. You are in my heart. I know that you are within all our hearts. Help us to find you in each other. Amen.

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A song inspired from one of the greatest intellectuals of our time,
Rene Girard’s work on the scapegoat mechanism:

There’s a horse,
There’s a rider
And they’re travelling home.
And the horse,
And the rider,
They travel alone.
What makes a journeyman move this way?
From the beginning to the end of day.
With no companions and none who care,
Our horse and rider,
Alone they Fare.

There are group of men who move in the day,
They are companions and together they stay.
High on their horses, as one they ride,
Upright on horses, yet empty inside.
They look so similar, they are the same.
For fame and fortune, they roam for gain.
Our horse and rider, a price on his head.
Our horse and rider, they want him dead.

What makes our man hunted for his hide?
He has his dignity,
He has his pride.
Our horse and rider, they have no bed.
There is no place for him to rest his head.
But he moves invisibly and can’t be seen,
And there’s no trace at all of where he’s been.
The sun is risen,
The hour bright.
But horse and rider,
Travel by night.

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On sensation or synethsisation, memory and consciousness, a thoughtful passage from ‘Swann’s Way’, (In search of Lost Time, Volume I, Marcel) Proust writes:
‘And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate then a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extra ordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detatched with no suggestion of its origin. And at once vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory-this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?’ ‘….I hope at least to be able to call it forth again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.’
It is through the use of colour and materiality of physically embodied sensed mark making (where another body sympathizes with the origin of the gesture, physicaly, with physical associations from shared visual experience (common recognition) and the evocated intensity (or dullness) of precise combinations of temperatured colours. The approach is an experimental one, with the sole observer as included as the response apparatus. One cannot tell in advance (intuit?) how precisely the values of colour combinations shall work. It is important as a scientist, not to take an approach from an already conceived system of colour theory, but to check via the correspondence method of direct experience. One must never over dramatize an effect, but minimize the colours (something I am learning), so as to bring them to a fundamental tonality, then the strong colours are strengthened, yet not overbearing one another, which is garish. In the current work I now discipline myself to he work of Eugene Leroy (and late Monet) and to him must I bow and learn, for he shows me a way forward. Learn the sensation of sense. The allusion to, of abstraction, towards which, to form becoming; being-existence formations pre-ontologically bear forth. We often think of abstraction as moving away from form, but sense is abstract and does it not come into form? Therefore it is the reverse just as much as transcending. It is opening of world-becoming and this must be captured alive.

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It is not so easy, when one swallows the entire world. To digest it all is not a simple task. Rather it is something that one finds both intoxicates as well as nauseates. Disturbs as well as disrupts all sensibility, as if one were drunk upon human difference. This however is the task and role played by the artist, the painter of worlds.
Ordinarily one is functioning. Normality takes its usual course. Sensibilty and reason govern and rationality is at the core of knowing and discernment. Yet when brush and paint take a hold, all this matters nothing and the unconscious, the truth, the real struggle of life and everything that is sharp, penetrates the skin and intelligence. That which was thought to be right, is now wrong and the wrong is really a little more right than one might have ordinarily thought and in between all of this is paint and sensation. Contrast, sound and touch. Grasping and yearning, always yearning. Things then move out. They do not tend to stay around but they do churn and summersault through the body and brain. People and events, sentences, faces, childhood dreams, mysteries and ancient political feuds spiral within and around ones orbit like moons or distant planets. Cities crumble into the future and are born over and over. The transmigration of the souls of civilizations breathe in and out and one coughs and splutters at the turps as it makes the head lighten and ache.
Still, it never stops the multiple structures of relationship and behavior of humanity. Sometimes when the colours are opening and dispersed in such a vivid variety of complex and multiple hues, it is better to think only in terms of grey. At least then the world becomes a workable task, and an aesthetic suggestion can slowly begin to emerge, take shape and blossom. The evocation of sensation. The nothingness of thought as it forms, without forming, without knowing, in closure. The forever dawn of becoming. This then becomes the task.
Studying the work of Eugene Leroy who seems to have taken Monet to the furthest extent possible, to the limits of suggestibility. It is so tempting to become utterly reliant upon such a great innovator. His development turns into a completely advanced form of thinking, one that (to my mind), leads to insight into thought, perception and imagination itself. This took him literally decades of experiment and practice. Painting in the darkness of obscurity and unrecognizability of what the thing is; the eventuating evolution and synthesis of Impressionism to the Field painting of abstract expressionism. How is one able to innovate in this manner? So too, how can one innovate and extend upon the limitation of form after Picasso, after abstraction? Yet again, how can one not?

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Art depends upon subtlety, suggestion, the conjuring through from the play of a hint, of a casual brush of a body, the temptation of what might be. It is the essence of seduction. Yet what has become of such a fine art today? It is not art, but media that is the brutal overtaking of all that is gentle, playful and light. All these forms of presentation, not representation, are gestures of force and blunt stupidity. Media is like the dumbness of an incompetent lover fumbling and forcing themselves to really ‘do you’, to fuck you and be the best…you know. That kind of thing, it doesn’t understand, or feel, it doesn’t know or have sense. It is only about the ‘me’, the ‘I’. Would you really wish for this and can you call it art? The magic in art is illusion, yet it is seductive illusion at its finest. It is the allure of a secret and mysterious language game, just as the way a woman might show the delicacy of her being with the display of her wrist, or by turning and raising her chin to reveal the vulnerability of her neck. It says everything and it says nothing, all at once. It’s very different in that space than the one that is ordinarily passed as image.

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I suppose what art really is about, at least for a painter, is that it is a means, the only means really, to holding the contradictions of human existence and life. That’s what it really is for I think. It’s out of a need to hold. The painting itself is fundamentally a frame, it is as itself, a contextualized space. Of course it doesn’t at all need to be framed with borders and all of that. Even an image on the wall of a cave is held in its own contextualized space. But it is essentially held in a space, a space for the eye to hold its thought. I can think of no other medium or expression of life for a human in society to actually do this other than in an artwork. Not even poetry Is as readily malleable and encompassing as an image is able to be, in its encapsulation and embodiment of a symbolic irredeemable and unresolvable sense of reality. With a poem you are taken, you are disrupted, it sparks open inside and bursts through the membrane, but a painting is ultimately a holding, with space, of space through form and idea. Spiritual systems might echo a pre-given solution and answer, but do you really believe that is without contradiction in itself? They always end up with missing pieces, don’t they. Philosophy cannot really do this, nor literature. Both rely upon sensibility, reason, at least to some extent for arguments sake and although a story might embody and feed through contradiction it is true, it doesn’t have the immediate there-ness of the immensity of the thing as it just is. There, in front of you and here. So I think that is the real need behind it all. It doesn’t resolve anything nor add to a solution to a problem. I don’t think this is what creativity really is. It’s not really dictated by any required or given system of functionality. It must abide by rules, and extend upon those rules as it urges, but it doesn’t purpose itself to ‘fix’ or to solve. There is no solution to life, to existence. To be human is to be contradictory. But a painting will hold this and in that there I think is great freedom and I think it’s where the heart is held too.

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The only comforting thoughts are those of death.

Ones mortality turns all things wonderous.

Existence and being gives us dreams we cannot fathom.

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The clouds in the air,
Subtly shifting are these gods of change.
Always disappearing and reappearing.
Having been,
Since the dawn of the earth.
These phantasms shall remain,
Long since the spectre of man has departed.
If only to continue their work
Of emptying the sky.

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There is in painting often the sense of an all at once, an overwhelm where the senses, especially the visual, see everything too fast and the idea cannot keep up with the interplay of imagination and sensation. Yet there is and are momentary breaks or ruptures of intelligent attack. The dance has many moves that continually fluctuate and move within those moves. However when one learns from their opponent all their ways in the dance then you strike and know and this movement is quite intense. The dance however deepens once a strike is certained and the complexity continues its kalideoscopic avenues.

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Thoughts come because of avoiding the body of the world.

To make art, is the world making painting.

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Our strengths are often also our weaknesses and vice a versa. This is true in art as it is in life. It’s helpful to see though that the mistakes we make, the edges in our character that make friction can also, at certain cruxes and pivotal points be the very qualities that are required. It is not always a good thing to be this way and am normally adverse to useless pointless conflicts that waste energy. Yet at certain times that it’s important, I see good qualities in those I might fight with. Proud qualities. Who they are comes through. I feel more in my heart, more goodness and truth in the other, when we can be raw with one another.

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You cannot argue with beauty. You will always lose, happily so.

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As a child, the only way I had to cope was to pray. Through it was found strength and hope. Now you rationally minded intelligent machines might imagine that to continue to behave in such a way is a regressive, niave enchantment which entertains false hopes and leads to disappointment and a break with reality. You are not wrong in this view, however I think differently because this is not the end of the story. When we do act in prayer, there is a true reality that only you may know. This is the real existential point of realism, that it is entwined with the unreal. Now if you are one who believes in the current religion of the one real true god of realism then please review how you came to this conclusion by ignoring the dreams of history hung upon the walls of the museums of the world. Reconsider how vital our invisible prayers are to be made visible and how the heavy hopes of angels are borne lightly in this way. Each picture is a prayer that holds protectively, a thousand cares and hopes sent out to the world.

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Sometimes for a briefest moment, you capture a glimpse of what might be and afterwards you can never let it go. Everyone knows how that feels in their forgotten memories. An artist realizes it is this fleeting moment that they dedicate their entire lives to and so pursue in their task of returning this memory, this lost, impossible hope, to all of us.

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The Sound in Everytown

The same sound
In every town
In every town the same sound
the same same sound
Resounds in every town

The sound in Everytown
The same sound
The same same sound
In Everytown the sound
Resounds the same

The town in every sound
The same town
The same sound
In every resounding sound
The same same town

In every resounding town
The same resounding sound
In every Everytown
In every every sound
The same the same the same

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First conquer one star, then move to the next.

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Kind sun in the morning, Seeps in with the dew.
Lays upon train tracks Turns red coals to blue.
Sadness is likened, To rain before light.
And moods do move through us, Transparently bright.

Trains draw to the station, And people embark.
The companions of weather, Must travel the dark.
Our science and our theories That carry these days.
They’re coloured by raindrops, And only this stays.

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Why would artists ever think that working in the interests of their fellows would be a way to help realize their own vision in the world? In such a covertly competitive environment would it not be incomprehensible to harbor the sentiment of an altruistic approach? If we look at history however, this is precisely how art has moved and shaped human thought.

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There is a man whom I see each time I am painting. We greet each other with a friendly wave and say ‘Hello!’. He had been supportive of me and encouraging I started painting in the underground car park, accepting me working there. He does not speak much English I think, but he has meant a lot to me when he says hello and waves in greeting. It is a feeling there that we share of respect and friendship. All we do is say hello and wave and it is so great. This picture I made for him today, while at the Chinese Gardens. I have been wanting to make it for him for a while now and now I can give it to him, so Im happy. The Chinese Gardens are exquisite and only costs $6.00 to visit. I always feel like it is some kind of miracle when I am in those gardens. It is just incredible the way the nature and the placing of each stone, each pebble, every tree and flower; a perfect, perfect art work that one inhabits and so do other animals. It just is a wonder. Hundreds of years of Chinese and Asian culture to culminate in this aesthetic.

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We all make mistakes. There is no one in life who is perfect. I certainly have made mistakes in life, and do my best in my intentions and actions to learn from them. Not every thing is simple. Human beings, our minds, are both simple, complex and unconscious; there is no real way of describing humankind. There is so much that is repressed and conflicting in our social structures, it is madness. I only know to have a heart, learn to be wise, learn from my mistakes as much as I possibly can. Good teachers in life are a of great benefit as they help us to see clearly. I am grateful for these teachers, even if sometimes I might disagree, they are the ones who have been of most help in life. I honour those ones, in my heart.

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A general truism: one can never really have a bad breakfast at diner time.

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Why would someone strive for a life of making objects? What kind of lonely-ness of nature determines such a disposition so as to isolate oneself in social observation and introverted, imaginative exploration; absorbing through sense and intellect the world as it is not, so as to reveal it as it is? Certainly an absence of some particular important element or required quality left out in childhood plays an overarching prominence in the motivation, yet the adult too is also detached from human association and connection. As well the psyche and the soul seeks to recreate forms with which it may interchange communicative defenses, seeking constantly to find place and grounding; reference points in which to locate itself in an ever changing landscape of reality dissipation and reformation.
It’s appreciative how Holderin writes in the poem ‘Though everyday I follow…’

Though everyday I follow a different path,
Now deep into green leaves in the wood, and now
Towards the Spring, the rock where roses
Bloom, from the hilltop look out, yet nowhere

I can find you, my love, in the light of day,
And into air dissolve all the words I learned,
Devout ones, when with you I

Yes, you are far indeed from me, blessed face,
And now the euphony of your life is lost
To me, your listener, and where are you,
Magical songs that would once make gentle

My heart with quiet known to the Heavenly?
How long ago, how long? That man has aged,
And Earth, the very earth that seemed to
Smile on me then, now is changed and shrunken.

Farewell, then, always. Daily the soul takes leave
Of you, returns to you, and the eye will weep
For you each day, to look more keenly
Into the distance where you are staying.

-Friedrich Holderlin

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Life is both strategy and will. That is an application and the overcoming. The good response to circumstances. Recently some works were damaged slightly due to flash flooding of the underground carpark where I paint. Now mother nature has once again taken it in her power to unleash another downpour. This time I’ve had fore warning and even then had I failed to completely follow through with appropriate defenses. Now must I battle the elements and obtain bricks in which to build a platform so the paintings are above sea level. We must take head of the opportunity of time given to us. Time misleads us into thinking it is abundant, yet the moment falls upon us before it is expected and we are taken by surprise yet again. Have just finished bread dipped in oil and Za’atar, so to keep in good health. Never go out in weather without proper nourishment. So now I flee to the underground garret.

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Here let me state a view. This view is as follows: in order for a work to be regarded as art, is not in our scope of argument, as it can be said that post-Duchamp, virtually anything goes. However what we do want to ascertain are two components of an enquiry, the later being dependent upon the former. Can art be calibrated as being of greater quality, relative to human concern, than another and if so then on what grounds do we stand upon our affirmation?

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If I say and answer in the affirmative, that a Van Gough is more in ‘quality’ than a simplistic picture of a cat made from basic shapes in order to simplify a sign, diagram or for the purpose of idle novelty, then I may move to the second relation. That I determine what is better based upon a number of factors, or upon a singular, outstanding or otherwise, value. Regardless at this point what they may be, the position is affirmed that there is indeed a basis for determining the said evaluation and condition.

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It may be that it is better simply because ‘I like it better’ or it is momentarily appearing as more appealing to my own personal sense. This then can be explored through divination, as to the particular conclusions and movements of one’s taste.

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That is all very good and suitable friends, to have ideas and declarations of ‘thou shalt not’. Ideas are superfluous though in the realm and arena of life and as art is its imitation allow this exasperated extrapolation. Let me display rather than argue or oppose (of which you are opposed to consider the application of in the aesthetic) such predjudices as previously eloquated. Allow only and oblige me to this indulgence if you will, to let an idle curiosity to settle within your minds. I poesy the question then, if you might forgive this flowery speech and speeching of flowers as follows; have you ever in your times, or other times for that matter, observed an ugly flower? If you answer upon pondering this query in the negative (we are by nature organistic beings as such and our offspring sharing the same distinction, why then is this the case; that a thing who’s purpose, this thing a flower, as it is but for the bees and the birds, been brought to bear in such a way, that only beautiful flowers, or at the least, exquisitely unique in some particular, way may grow? Why then, are flowers only beautiful and not the opposite?

This follows then, then question of how art may live accordingly.

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Small thoughts.

If ignorance is the condition of our mind, and ignorance is by definition to ignore, it means to be in this condition as fundamental state. Then the being outside of this condition, by not being in the condition of a turning away from; truth, spirit or essence, that marks our delusion, our deluded state. Then it is little wonder that ones condition, as in human condition, is that of not turning towards anything that may represent or lead to a turning towards, rather than a turning away. This would also include then, beauty or the beautiful, or the representation, or the evocation of essence. Beauty is kindred soul to appreciation itself. Have you noticed this?
So then it would make sense that spiritual teachings or life practice does not involve any kind of need for promoting itself, as it is simply not the nature of itself and what it is, as its basic ontology. So then the way of art, as spiritual path, is perhaps the same, for it is the student of beauty.

No!

This is not and never can be a consoling philosophy for any failure on my part. I must forge ahead by planning ahead. The thought determines the reality. There are and never can be, any excuses.

It is do or die.

One comes across most unusual circumstances in which thoughts and ideas occur and spark the need to write them down. Even frustrating events may unfold that induce a state of readiness and prompting from what may emerge the knowing to act in thought and pen.
One desire has been of growing urgency of recent times, and that is to exhibit. To exhibit and to attain good recognition as an artist. The importance of making work of and of being with, deep intention and integrity looms to the foreground of the mind. To be of good heart. To have the sense of knowing of where and of how that place is, in ones being, in simplicity.
There too is also this push forward from within one as well as an understanding, or at least an expectation of where one needs to be, and from that future place, the gap of ignorance widens in its apparent reality. So there is frustration and desire, confusion, limitation. There is also will. Determination. To find a way to do it. The ‘I can’, the ‘I will’.

So I think about what actions that I might take and what avenues are available, what will work. There are limitations such as finance, contacts, the interests of others and their ability to recognize the particular kind of work. Upon thinking of these things I come to see a real kind of futility as the external conditions don’t completely or currently appear to match the requirements of the goal. How can I assume so much of this? It is not of my knowledge of what the future can and might bring, although I admittedly aspire to a form of prophetic determination in regards to the possibilities of art image making. I am at present working on the inner mind, in directing the focus of attention, as well as in making the works and in absorbing inspiring information and material. I need to stretch and to see what other areas I might work with such as creating greater contacts and networking with those in the related field, such as art writers and critics. Not many, if any, but there might be someone.

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The disagreements I have with Realism are numerous, but it comes down to one crucial element that was intuited in early childhood. It is that realism leads ultimately to despair. It is fundamentally closed in its position and based upon unstable grounds, for nothing can be said to be certain. Of course this assertion is also therefore as unfoundational as any other. The solution then is not pragmatism, but practice. Experimental practice to be precise. This allows for the testing of imagination which is innovation; the heart of creativity. It leads not to realism, but to the opening of worlds.

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Let this desire be thy love and that love, the life of thee.

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Thank you for vodka, it makes the mind honest! Those who make assumptions regarding impulse of passion are familiar only with convention. They do not share the disdain that individuality can only know or liberty for that matter. Most important is it, and above all, to embrace life and to surrender to that which is true to your soul, regardless of approval. Do not conform to the small box of approval. Art does not depend upon acceptance. Art depends upon the determination of acceptability. This only accumulates morphogenetically through the accumulative experimentation of reality and chance. Everything else is simply either experience of what works, or fear.

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Why do the circumferences of trees and clouds appear alike?
How can it be that there is a you and an I?
Weather your prayer is a leap of courage,
A communion with intimate mystery
Or from a cry for help.
What matters is if in your interaction in life,
Are you moving further away or closer to,
Your purpose of Wonder?

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The day is hot, then cold. Predictable, uneventful. I notice more. I am vulnerable in places others are not, or appear not to be aware of in themselves. I am frightened, alarmed. Anxiety becomes security. I have found myself crying but only in my sleep, in my dreams and I awake with a sadness in my heart and I cannot, or perhaps it is because of this reason that I am unable to, remember clearly why.

The sexual imagination has taken on monolithic proportions. It is fortunate that painting is a highly tantric activity.

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There was a little more thoughtfulness this time. A little more thought in decisions. Energy is important, but so is consideration. I am finding new relationships with subtle hues of colours; the way they work with each other from across various spaces of a picture. It is almost like field painting, but the form and figure are a critical dictate of what colours go where and the idea of the work determines the ‘why’ of the colours. Designates their purpose which again gives rise to other areas of a work – the more important ‘ground’ that allows an image to become or to be. This in turn feeds the requisites of the centrifugal point, or original form.

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There a times when it is best not to say things, to keep a greater silence.
More often than not perhaps. The times when words are best unspoken, unheard, even un-thought. The sun takes time to cross the sky and so the night is made more potent thereby. Aloneness, anguish, and despair; beckon my longing.

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What is it you are giving people, when at their alter you present to them your sacrifice? Nothing they do not already possess or are. Yet it is something they may have over looked, or forgotten about, in their other wise preoccupied condition.

You are showing them the immanent truth of life. Not the facts of life that every school child knows. Our purpose is not to educate, nor to imitate.

We show.

The truth of life itself, of existence of our being. Not a metaphysics, but a metachemistry. A new alchemy from the senses of the world soul body. A real grandiosity of naked physics; erotic reality.

The synethsteia of negation: numbness, absence, death, cold but married to the sun and air; the equation of life.

To do that you must see colours where there are only shades. You need to understand the machine of despair as a holy place – as a Mosque, and then know that Mosque (utilized from that poet – A.R.) as the body of the world.

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From this point onwards be only that which you are determined towards from the truth and depth of your being. Therefore then allow all lightness, subtleness, spontaneity and variety be a choir of sound, images, ideas that forever call you to bring out from far back behind you; heart, life, will, love. Then from there, embrace this world with the passion of a soul all aflame.

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There is no thing more important than the true cultivation of the soul and spirit.

In all your interactions with the world do you learn to develop the capacity of your soul, the quality of your art, your understanding, the appreciation of existence.

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If it is so, that with Being; the individual, essential nature of the soul that body and mind are related to, then could the world itself, the body and mind of that be related to a greater, encompassing Being, that too, might be similar to the individual soul and its intentionality? The question this alludes to, is that is there a kind of way of looking at the body and mind of world, and a way of holding that in relation to a relationship with what might be the true-er intention of that Being-ness?

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Tonight did I encounter a Black Magician and that dark mage did come down and he did dance with me and stared into my eyes and entered into my mind and those eyes stared out through my eyes and I did see from the depths of the night and with in that darkness of his heart an unfathomable intensity, more full than could yet be and as empty as freedom Herself and vital. Vital! Such life of strength and heat, oh surety and living essence. He spoke through his dancing and was I swept away? Oh entirely. That dancing spoke and said to always trust life. She yet speaks and holds but from a distance many steps past your own legs might ever travel. Yet she knows and understands what it is that you follow and how you pursue, that you live for and with her elemental principles and she knows, yes how she knows. So trust her. She is life and she sees you and knows herself, as she lives in you. Then the mage covered his face with his cloak of velvet blackness. That phantom night sky that danced, flew, spun and soared, beyond the beyond of night. In life I feel so scared, anxious and inadequate, as if this intelligence is being suppressed so as to conform. Yet in painting…all such strength and a brilliance awakens in all of the being. She is teaching you humility my child. From humility must come strength, as from persverence it is the outcome; from the forging of your spirit, there shall you know true confidence, as well you shall have legs to dance. And then oh wondrous gifts, this living daemon, this spirit of the abyss, the Dark Magician; I caught it in my brush. It was living right in the palm of my hand! It took over me still though I called to it saying triumphantly ‘I have you!’, as just at the end of the evening did it weave its potent spell. ‘Dance with me in my brush’ I invoked it ‘and I shall free you. I summon you to dance with me. Dance inside my brush. Dance, dance, dance upon my brush.’ It threw its spell through the portal of the painting and three to five colours at once, with one hit, threaded and spread a web of entwining, temperate light and dark music, throughout the world in the work. ‘Dance upon the blade of my palette. War and cut with this sharpened blade – she cut, she cried, she went mad with passion. She called on high pitched voice, as paint caught upon the brush awaiting its execution ‘She is looking to go home’. I held the brush up like a wand, a torch of black magic and upon it was an angel, a woman, and she was crying to go home and she found a place to go home upon the world of the canvas. This frenzy continued and I tried to stop it, but the spirit took possession and it spat in mischevious frustration, spittles of paint and blood upon the work until I allowed it to finish and subsume itself to rest. This is how it happened. It danced upon my brush.

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As the story of Martha Graham seeped into my ears and inside my skull, tears and waves of connection flooded the body. A unity exists between all of the kind of the species known in the world as artists. This woman and the group of dancers she formed, brought an entirely new form of dance that never before existed into the world. One that was situated in the intelligence of body emotionality and that co-inhabited the modern mood of art. This spirit that all artists are the children of is a real and existing mystery. It is the Truth of the universe and is completely natural. Painting is itself, the thought of the body. The feeling of intelligence that is the living thing itself. Spirit is flesh as flesh is world, and what is mind, thought and idea but movement that feels as emotion, then, as Martha Grahem says; movement – dance – is communication.

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I have two kinds of spirits living within my heart, as a result of the speaking-ness of ones practices. One, the creative force, the other the destructive, elemental nature. Both are a part of the rhythmic movement of the making of the act of creative momentum. At times ones finds they are in a kind of dance with one another. When the creative dove, she starts to take to flight, beauty rises from the sea and her waves caress the shore before ones very gaze. Yet this lovely one does not allow its way to stretch out before itself in time. She does not bare her body in the burning sunlight but covers herself with appropriate modesty, the infinite hidden. Then the other may appear and seize her by the throat. She sees all in that perfect wholeness with a striking malice. She grasps this dove with such a ferocity that her wings are torn to pieces. Her feathers start to form a new great and malignant phoenix from whence arises the tearing of what is, into what will be.

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A painter must not let himself be to seduced by either side of himself, or one will suffocate or destroy the other. He need to listen only to his daemon only and harness and channel these two powerful elements of the artists soul.

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It is easy and quick to lose what is gained and to forget the grounds of the work. Remembering all of the parts that have allowed for the emergence of a particular kind of image. Struggle forth to bring the ground of the past, again and again to the front of the field and allow it there to dwell. From that ground all things will move; the past within a work that shall equate to the future of the thought.

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I have identified previously some key areas of life conditions that are relevant in an artists establishment. They are briefly: the qualified art writer, who is able to articulate and recognize the quality of a work and communicate this to others who have the means of representing an artist and bringing that oeuvre to the attention of the art world or art public. In our environment however there is much less of a demand for this kind of communication. I am contemplating an underground system of networks amongst my fellow creative community to form niches and packs so as to build a kind of rebel dialogue. These are the workers in the field who are adept at recognizing the current scene and appropriately assessing it, and being able to make democratic judgements about it. If this is something that I need to help bring about, I need to get my contemporaries to actually understand this situation and take it seriously. So far it is as if they are still interested either in soley their own enterprise, yet they do not see the potential available to them through effective group formation. This is a particular trajectory that is really one kind of potential approach. There are others. I think though, there needs to be some kind of communicable dialogue between the workers, so as to allow for a build up of a kind of neuronal social brain that can then articulate to other systems of human network, the kind of world they are relating towards, and so this particular kind of understanding can culminate into something of meaningful, developed significance. I often bring back to the fore, the way the early abstract expressionists had their domain. This is a kind of model that allows a ripening for a new species to flourish.

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Reflections on ‘Mastery’ by Robert Greene: it is super! A lot of things we already know about Genius and creativity, yet good to be reminded about. Also there are points we pick up on that one would not have recognized previously. Creating some extra connections that lead towards the solving of the problem.

I especially like the inclusion of Buckminster Fuller, whom I do not really know much about at present. There is also a section about Charles Darwin and his voyage on the Beagle. It is just fascinating the way his response to his life experiences brought about the conclusion of his theory of evolution.

Here a reference from Fuller’s state of consciousness when he was just about to take his own life:

‘From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.’

What I find most compelling about this work however, is its emphasis on social intelligence. Not only mentorship, but its elucidation on the practical and political realities of the world and in emphasizing establishing within one’s practice the right priorities. To follow the path that is the more difficult, but the one that leads to the right destination.

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The self identification of being an artist; a particular kind of artist, is clarifying in discriminating in regards to choices one may make in terms of thinking and making. It is however, also a limitation towards one’s thought and therefore creativity. So, practically speaking, one need to be able to dance in-between identities and not to fixate on one in particular. At the same time, if one is dancing with a partner and to a particular musical beat, then you must dance with them through the whole of the song. To depart from such an engagement is a great disgrace. Not only to the thinker, but more importantly, to the thought.

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Oh I must write this down. Upon walking home, a little thought occured to me to listen to how one listens. To concentrate upon the sounds occuring around oneself. Crossing the street, the distance of cars prior to the expectation of their visual representation. How soon the sound approaches the listener as the distance of the vehicle is calculated pre-conceptually. The sound of traffic lights awake a strange landscape of an alien world with metallic life resonating around. Then the consideration and recognition of the sound of thoughts themselves, of language and of the making sense of things as they run along. Then there simultaneously is the paradoxical duality witnessed of apparent inner and outer sound of thought and sensation. A differentiation as well as perception of common occurence, still the same as one thing, yet with a wall from ones skull the only seeming boundary. The memory too becomes hyper vigilant as sensibility is reframed from surrounding vistas of darting stimulus. Sight itself intensifies. How does one ever manage to cross the street at all with such a force of life continually pressed upon ones being? Yet incredible is but a brief moment of the world.

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It is the slight adjustments that bring about the overall feel of a painting. When a picture is thought, as in acted onto, over and over. That is what thinking in painting is, or part of it at least. And you start to see things appear and dissappear and appear and it is quite wonderous and then at other times immensely agitating, and well, you keep on going with it. But beware the crux, that act of low intelligence: realism! There a good people in the world who are realists, and by being so are capable of being of great help to others ultimately. An artist though is never this kind of creature. We are by practice, although caring and kind, fundamentally self-centred and reclusive animals. Yet we do give, or are meant to give by our works, a reason for living. A non-rational reason for living. Just as the sight of a beautiful woman does. And when you sleep at night, would you ever wish to have a realistic dream? You will never find anything meaningful in the mind of the realistic. In fact if you are being realistic, you are wanting the brain to do something it simply cannot, that is being realistic. No, our dreams do not come from being real, but they are influenced by the real, and so they aim to influence the real. Meaning is not apparent when it is void of mystery. When it thinks it knows.

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More and more do you find your work take on its own nature. As experiment leads to experiment, the nature of the work begins to build a livingness all of its own. It is a kind of beast, something that the artist forms from the beam of an idea that lands into the skeletal structure of the painter, the ground of the idea being built up and cultivated from the world. You recognize that what you are making is less recognizable, not as easily seen and certainly less like-able to more people. Yet you also know that there will be those who will see it. You keep this in mind as understandings start to become more relatable with the ones whom you have kept in your mind, those exemplars of the faith.

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Walking home tonight I came across an image along the road of a shadowy form. I was unable to work it out. Although I knew it was just some strange shape from the shadows that turned out to be a tree, it appeared at first as a very alien and peculiar object. I noticed my mind forming and anticipating strange fantasy of what it was. This lent an idea to me. If one were to make a form, an embodiment of fear itself, what that might be. The fear from the core of the human psyche, objectified in form, rather than remaining an unconscious background from whence the ground arises. I wonder what could be brought to bear from an object such as that?

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Stop looking at the short. Look at the long. See with distance of view. Observe the trajectory of play, not the small games. They are only knots in the string, less relevant then what the string is tied to.

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It can seem at times, that a work is losing its life, that it is no longer taking in itself the same vitality that it has had previously. That a deadening kind of severity is upon it instead. You must learn to see into this severity, this heavy death of life. Look a little more, take a little more time with your looking into. You will see no death there any more for you begin to see real life flowing from what appears as lifeless and very dulled. You shall find patterns of subtle hues of potential form and ground ever building itself through an interweaving web of its whole. It is like seeing the dark and empty street at night just after the rain, and expecting only gravel and pitch. Then look, really look at it. Then the fantastic reflection of glistening light, dispersed fragments, of multitudinous change and possibilities. It is as as if heaven were drenching itself into your very gaze. This is how painting matures. Through taking time in looking, slowly, and you see.

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You have to understand, that painting is a practice of trust. It is something that does not bring itself into completion very readily. You build it up through thorough experiment. It is a practice that ever destroys its own history, over and over, until something is made in its finality, something strong.

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Oh great life, is it the way you really appear to be? Is it just that way and nothing else? In all your beauty and mystery you are harsh, So it is little wonder that my kind, your kin, imitate you so. I see them and I see you and I am one like you also, Animal, us all. Yet I cannot believe (and are we not your flesh and blood?), That I am just this thing, and you are just this thing, And they are just these things. Because I feel and so do they. Although they are so very much ignorant of the fact (they are a childhood forgotten). So numb, but we are born with skin, And vulnerable from birth, you make men and you make women. Most are dull yet some, Can feel. And they are the ones who have wondered always, Oh great life, if you feel too As they feel?

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Love and beauty are synonymous and meaning and truth are similarly related. Love engenders beauty to be beholden and beauty itself is the felt sense of the significance of meaning. Therefore the meaningfulness of truth is significantly beautiful for it is love.

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Let your imagery speak to you from the void. Do not allow yourself to make sense of it. If you see it, others will learn to see it in time also. Trust what you see with what you feel and dont try to turn it into something so very real. It wants to open itself up and it can repeatedly destryoy itself as it does so,. It is difficult not to try to close it down but you learn to find the right anchors as necessary for a works formation.

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We dont normally read about the uncertainty an artist goes through if we learn about their life story. Really we dont ever hear so much about the doubts, hesitancy and feelings of weakness that people go through who have achieved great things. It might be mentioned here and there but unless it is a characteristic part that makes up their story, these lines are erased. Yet surely they had these feelings. Man is not without these vulnerabilities. What I do think is that these people decide willingly to rise above them, to actually decide firmly, resolutely and with certainty, over and over and over again, that they will. They will, they will, they will. Nothing else happens unless you continue to decide your fate. You have to have the faith of Noah. The thoughts will continue to doubt because they come up to a big place they do not know how to get past. Alright, so it calls something to you. It calls for you to find the qualities within yourself and to bring them out. Also, I think that there is a kind of intelligence at play, some kind of teacher that has you to learn something. It takes a patient mind to go to be with that. It is difficult when the moment is an impatient one. So you be with it all, you just let it all be there. The goals, the obstacles, the uncertainty, the frustration, the ignorance, the pain, the absolute smallness of yourself and as you can do that, you begin to find the qualities, a little a time, that they are hiding behind them.

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Adult humans spend most of their time getting things done quickly and trying not to make mistakes. It is different for a child at play and it is different for an artist at work. A painter tries very hard to make mistakes, really good ones. If they are not, then they are failing, One need to continue to find mistakes that work. Unusual incidents that are unexpected and unintentional. Sometimes however; there are mistakes. They are more like false passages one travels down for a time and upon recognizing that they go no where, or that they were much better off quite a while back down the track before they continued head long and they could have listened to their guide who hinted they better wait a while at the cross roads a lot longer, on a particular work. These too of course, the artist knows contribute to a works virtue. More often than not however, it is as if the laws of human behavior require a complete reversal. One even knows that they are willingly doing the wrong thing, that they know better than to take particular approaches and follow certain strategies when there are much better options and paths to follow. Yet the painter knows that those have always been walked previously, and they will only go in the same direction. They know that they have to feel like they are scraping their nails down the blackboard every so often. It is a sense like this. It is not one that leads directly to more pleasure and certainty, not to more beauty, or even a cliche of ugliness or distortion. Things have to fit with appropriate relationships and the right variation. They have to work, but there is a way to reach a place where the work itself dances in a language that uses secret incantations that is not used in common tongue.

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Bataille’s philosophy of excess describes aptly the way an experimentalist painter goes about producing and making a work. It is entirely un-economical to continue to pour upon a canvas a history of paint. It is as if one were discharging an over abundance of artillery fire upon an empty field of battle; assuming the enemy were hiding in places that one can only imagine. It is very much in this sense, as futile as war. Even more so, as a war apparently has a cause to fight for. Less so even than the expenditure of the wastefulness of reproduction and the multitudeness replication of species in all forms of life. Not only this but neglecting to document and relying upon a stretch of the imagination to recall what has been before, the many movements, shapings emotions, thoughts and gestures, marks and erasures; like the mind itself thinks it thinks. Foregoing the temptation to plan ahead yet being persistent in some kind of idea or overarching intent, some sensible realization of a possibility. Such waste and futility. Yet it makes life interesting, strange and bizzare. So, like life, one continues to make beautiful things.

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All things are best balanced and tempered, by love.

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Like Leonardo, think of how waves are formed. Then you understand better the nature of things.

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How do you judge between what you do and what you are?

Often our actions are not in accord with who we take ourselves to be. Therefore we must hide this from ourselves in one way or another.

I am like this but I am not like that. I do this, therefore I am that. If I do that and am that, I am not the other; and yet I find I do the same.

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Each lesson we learn is held by a greater one.

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Creativity, where it comes from? I do not know if even this we can ask. The best you can do is to just be in her company, and watch her and listen. Perhaps she might amuse herself and dance some. Then she will both delight you and look at you with such great disdain that you will fall in love with her. If you have courage you may try to dance with her. You’ll feel the fool but I can tell you; it is only the fools that she loves. So trip over your feet to get to her but never do it purposely – she will know and run faster than you can see. When you find your legs and eventually you will, then you take her, be faithful to her, you would not want for anything else besides. None can surpass the magnificence and mystery of her beauty for beauty is what you are loving after all. Your muse is yours to respect and worship. Bow to her then reverently and kiss her toes and feet, her thighs, belly button, neck and lips. Look into her gaze and be lost. You must love her, but magnificently and humbly. She expects no less.

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As the old myth says; it is a searching because there was a voice you heard and it spoke to you. A great emergency to go running out into the desert to become completely lost. Stumbling and grasping forward to find something with the entirety of the origins of civillization hungry and complaining that they have been led astray. All attempts at an unseeable salvation are without even hope. Day and night pass by and the land and your lungs are completely dry. Then you think, amidst all the delusion that you see a mirage before you. Something that suggests itself, a graspable thing, an idea! And the oceans come gushing forth and you summon God and you part them and there you see a path, a way to that destination and you are simply so grateful.

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I am very calculated with the messes that I make. I do not take a disaster lightly. If you’re going to do something wrong, you might as well do it right. Do it perfectly incorrectly. Then it will be right the first time. If you dont fuck it up completely, you’ll make a mess of it right from the beginning. So you have to know what you are doing wrong, so you can make it more wrong. New ideas spring from the best of bad beginnings, disasterous middle stretches and heroic leaps out from the bottom of the pit. Even then you’re best not realizing that you have jumped out of the fire and into the inferno, because then you will end up making a mess of that, by trying to make it better. You see, you have the mess you made has been built by indeterminant rules that it is now governed by. It has intervened through its own design, and for that it needs space, darkness, even unconsciousness ( now that is something western mind doesnt like at all – although its very good at pretending to be its opposite).
One thing for sure; dont do what you already know how to do.
We think that we have to add more good to make things better, but this is unnatural. You dont add more good to the body when its got a problem. You give a bit of bad; a little poison. The poison normally is a bad thing, but you know, a little bit and the body learns from it, knows how to fight it, and it gets stronger. So you see, we think the bad is a bad thing, but the bad; its really the good thing, when it works with nature. You know when baby is crying, the mother and the father try to give baby warm milk, give it the breast, play music to make baby sleep, jiggle baby yup and down and nothing works. Mother and Father all upset and fight. Russian mothers give their babies a bit of vodka in their bottles and then chug on the rest. Baby and mummy go to sleep a lot quicker then. Practical and makes sense, right. But of course Lao Tzu was around along time ago.

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Really, unless they feel completely incompetent, an artist will never destroy a work, though they may continue a work to the point of destruction. This is the true nature of Brahman. Though appearing as destruction and the multiplication of a negative, what is really taking place through an over-process is creation; or rather creativity. This is as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus explicated upon. Before Greek philosophy, the evocation originated from the Indian Yogi’s. This is the origin of philosophy and of western culture.

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An artist paints not just for posterity. An artist works for and from life itself. It is in this that their trajectory is directed. Without the life of Van Gough, there would be no Van Gough. If who and what an artist is is eliminated, then so too is their work. This is why it is fundamental that you keep in accordance with this principle. The only one who can deny this, remove this quality, is the artist themselves. Picasso was completely himself, that is why it worked. Do not worry about being noticed so much, if you deny your essential nature, it is you who will notice, sure enough, in your work. Certainly too, if there is a quality that life calls from you, that too cannot be denied from Her, and you will realize that as the quality of your work will develop accordingly. As such it is as Nietzche says; you tell a philospher, artist, by the way they live their life. It shows.

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Artists seem to miss the enormous opportunity they have in consolidating with one another. I endeavour to find the moment, the pivotal point whence to harness that potential. As the direction of a single beam of light upon a crystal causes it to refract and disperse itself into a fantastic and multifaceted radiation of its own element. So too may we as artists light up the world with such variation of brilliance, as individuals and as collective co-creators. It is as it has been in history. You have to see it.

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It is the way the colours merge, before they merge. It’s how the paint reacts and responds to itself, its own history of textures and surfaces. The build-up of this creates it sown aesthetic. The way it builds crevices and caves for its fluids to disperse through. It is as if it is a continually breathing and living organism, with and without boundaries, at one and the same time. One that does not cease to flow with its own impulse to become. The way the paint takes shape. The void as it disperses itself, forms and reforms. It is like water and light upon the earth.
I want only a suggestiveness to the form. You don’t want anything too solid. Nothing concrete or exact. This kills everything. It needs to be like the rumbling of Beethoven. The disappearing of the breath. It needs to breathe. It cant do that without moving. The abstract beauty of it. The evocation of a feeling. The suggestion of an image and representation. Space for the imaginative faculty to interact.

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Sometimes it’s right to be wrong and wrong to be right. There are times in painting, as there are in life where it is the right thing to do the wrong thing, because it is the wrong thing to do the right thing; and in life, as in art, is there really a difference?

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So re-reading the seven variations of change re: spiral dynamics, ch. four. All of those versions of change seem to be readily applicable to the development of the artistic process itself. All the way from fine-tuning to stretch up/down, entrapment and resurging a new form (of expression). It fits perfectly into the creative process itself. Remarkable.

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Only the heart feels, therefore only the heart can know. From conversation with a friend.

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I think to paint the rain in a beautiful and interesting way; contained and elementally, superficially (as in surface-ly, as it glides upon surfaces). This has potential.

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This afternoon a Buddhist Meta practice. Normally is of sending compassion to oneself, to one you care for, to others whom you ordinarily do not notice, to those you have found difficult. Only in this time, I only felt to hold those in my heart. Not sending love, but to only hold them in my heart. Then to hold the whole world in one’s heart. It is a beautiful and simple practice, or, way of being.
I then watched a documentary on Mother Theresa. So much love and to learn. Not only in life but also in relating this to how an artist lives their life. Trust in ones practice and in the intention of ones work. Great beings in life carry enormous truth and power. The universe carries them. It is because they embody the great intention of benefitting others. It is through love. In caring for the good of others. True humility is the quality that reflects this embodiment.
Therefore, carry humility in your practice and in your work. Find strength in the challenges of life. Bring goodness out of yourself. Give your work and yourself as a gift and do for the benefit of humanity. That is where true power is. Just to follow that principle, that is primary.

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Dekooning once wrote a letter to his father. In it he described to him the beauty of living and making art. It was written during the time when he was going through great poverty, during the Depression period, living as an artist and just getting by to afford some materials. He told him how lovely it was simply to live in this way, that there is so much beauty in it. He told his father that he didnt mind or care if nothing came out of it all. It was simply that there was great beauty in it.
You learn more and more this simple truth as you work. You learn that all the grandiousity and delusions the imagination constructs to defend itself against feeling hopeless, all the games the mind plays and the biology of the body reacts with its cravings. Its not only strengthening to move through it, time and time again, but it teaches you something. That it is as Dekooning said to his father, it is just beautiful, and so it is. You just continue to do what you do, and watch all the ways you defend against feeling suffering and hopeless. You just continue to do it, and it teaches you.

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In nature, the same species recognizes their own kind. The right people recognize the right person. So you need not be so concerned then about being recognized, because it is ultimately inevitable. All you need to do, is to be, that which you are. Be fully that and nothing else. What this means is that you need to be not just determined, but completely clear without any uncertain distractions whatsoever. All you are is what you are. This is what shows. All you give is what you give. Your gifts are to be given, it is not the other way around. Your mind, you develop this, you sharpen it as you work. It shapes you, forms you. Your work humbles you. Your work strengthens your will. There is no going back. That is what people recognize. It is an undeniable quality. True strength. Those who are of the same, also see it because they know it, as they are it.

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Reflection:

You are still preoccupied with distracting concerns. Although you may be disciplined in your practice, there is still so much that you are being lost to. Life understands and knows you completely. There is a depth and direction that you know you are qualified to meet, within yourself. Get to that point. You shall be all the more clearer for it. Rid yourself of all unnecessary preoccupations that are not inline with your deepest purpose. Life wants for you to grow. There is do much more to your true potential, and you know and sense this in your honesty.
You wont find the feeling of value out in the world. It does not exist there as value and worth are intrinsic and fundamental qualities of reality in itself. Though you shall find this out for yourself. Deepening your intention shall help to show this to you as is your dedication of the work for the benefit of humanity.

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‘Promotion for a visual artist–that involves a clique of top decision makers, one that’s very hard to enter.’ Howard Bloom

Clarifying the systems involved in artistic exposition.

Consider the situation of the modern artist in our current times, who seeks to establish themselves in their own land; we can take four essential perspectives. Those are namely the personal, self element, the interpersonal social aspect, the objective produced work and the inter-objective systemic element of institution and commerce.
I may also include with this various strategies available and open as ways of approaching the intended outcome of establishing oneself in this field. Certain approaches are more readily useable than other and also more natural and desirable. There are also various avenues that, although open as options are really not applicable as they are a breach of principle and integrity. They are however kept in abeyance, as all avenues are ideally a reflection of a more or less open system of flex and flow.
Now to address the first and primary element of he personal and subject position of the artist; this is really to do with ability, productivity and artistic principles that the particular artist follows. They create, or build their work in accordance to their values and in what they really believe is true to them. So, as long as the work being made is of an actual quality, the primary self, individual dimension is here taken care of.
The second area would be the objective element and is in this case, fundamentally linked in with the first. It is the artwork as it stands in itself. Therefore it is covered by the prior discussed position. What is important here really is of course the actual quality of the form created itself ie. if it is ‘actually objectively and formally good’.
This naturally ties in with the third component of this spectrum that is the interpersonal realm. There requires the actual community of those who can accurately assess the work. This can be quite problematic in the realm of art as we all know and are aware of. The artist, if they are pushing the boundaries of their form, are introducing a new element into the works, and therefore the competent deciders of the community or group need to asses their discretion with an element of something they are fairly uncertain over. If the work is more readily recognizable, it then runs the risk of really being too conservative and mainstream; something that is alternate to an avante-guard agenda. Realistically and practically speaking however, an accurate assessment can be made within reasonable boundaries, if 1. The work is properly understood in its context and 2. If the work covers a certain element of ground behind itself from previous historical works in which it has built itself up by and expanded from. It ought to be noted of course, that this elect community needs to be available and actually established, not only to be able to make the assessment at all, but so too as to have any other influence among other community groups who would be related in another area. This leads us to the fourth perspective.
The fourth perspective of the intra personal area; that of the actual institutions that might hold and promote such works. They are clearly in a direct relationship to the interpersonal perspective previously discussed. Now if theses institutions contain in themselves problematic biases that have to do with economic and business priorities over artistic ones, then without the community of qualified assessors who may be able to influence and convince the institutions that these works are actually of high value and worth, then there is a discrepancy in establishing a link between the two types of structures.
Now this is a very simplified sketch of a slightly more complex setup involving different kinds of community influence as well as varied kind of institutions and conditions like them that may function in a similar way. I have not yet discussed the possible avenues of strategy relating to these different groupings. To very briefly summarize, they may take the approach of discovering greater sources of data and connections to build a network that may in time increase the likelihood of accessing available cliques who may confirm approval of certain work. Another possibility is to continue to work it through and push on relentlessly regardless of or not the conditions are met for the ‘inter’ and ‘intra’ social and commerce dimensions to be available, or allowing the persistent test of time to see it through. There are other possibilities also that may involve a change of the individual subject in some way, this could also lead to different possibilities opening up that were not so recognizable previously.

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Notes from the field:

What is your art about? Is it for reputation or is it for truth? Truth itself does not require reliance upon name or representation. Learn to trust that truth that is not weak in the way reputation is vulnerable. Yes you may need to work on building a repertoire, for a gallery to see what your work is about, but you must trust that it will occur when it is required. It may never be brought about in the way you expect or hope for. Understand that this is completely alright. You do your work because it is important to who you are and what you are to give. It is your truth and it is your gift that you have chosen to give this world, before you leave. Yes you can do what you can to gain recognition and take practical measures for your art to be preserved and kept safe. But the lesson here is always the trust in who and what you are. Yes you make the decision. You choose to exhibit and succeed in getting your work communicated and recognized. You give your value, value that is related to the truth of the human heart. As you maintain your integrity and truth, you declare the value of yourself. Do not sell yourself out. Do not give any less than what you are capable of. Do not lower your standards. Be decisive and strong, clear minded in your direction to attain your goals. Remember what is truly important is your truth to yourself, and the path you follow, that is art.

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Continue to work as you do and progress. You are correct to notice that there are times when you need to paint with greater ferocity, and when to build up the work gradually, or to be more gentle. Then you will also need to paint with greater abandon, at the right time, in the right moment. You need to learn how to bring forth the paint itself to maximal effect and versatility. In greatest flexibility of freedom, but in ways that are not always so obvious and extroverted either. Remember what is that quality in the painting that has genius in it? What is it that simply lifts it beyond and up with the great? Where does it take you? From where does it speak? YOu must learn to pay attention to that voice. Do not be preoccupied with other things.

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An Artists path is one where you learn to be with your own loneliness. At first you attempt to escape from it in thought, and in a kind of wishing toward some future hope. You try all different techniques to escape from that feeling. You romanticize about your own melancholia. You fantasize and yearn for sex. You continue to paint it through. You stimulate your senses in the intoxication of musical pleasure and ideas. You try to get beyond it all in deepening the void. You try all sorts of ways to attract attention. Yet to allow that loneliness, and that despairing hopelessness to simply be as it is, that is the beginning of art. Then, from there, what takes place?

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Despite the VanGohian rendition of a painter, an artist does not conform to any specified role,(such as an outsider or outcast) or condition. An artist is simply one who cant but help to give themselves up to the creative spirit. This entails a commitment that is below the surface level of appearances or political identifications. It is something that is discreetly undefinable. It is like the edge of the horizon, the point where the sky and ground seem to meet, but is continually receding back from any fixed locality of view. A visible, singular and simple proposition, but one that is continually eluding an understanding from its own ground of reference.

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You cannot have true love without being truthful with the one you love.

Being authentically oneself and to another is a sure way to clarity. They either come closer to you or move farther away. However events may transpire, truth is always greater than falsity and therefore the only real choice.

You may speak in several languages simultaneously and quote great words from men and ladies of the time, yet if cannot speak the language of your own soul truly and deeply all your knowledge is meaningless to you. Do not be afraid of your own imperfect love for it is only what is beautiful.

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I suppose if one were so successful in the mating game, life would not induce the sublimation of the drives toward greater creative actions and achievements.

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A tree that grows in the wind learns to grow up bent over. It takes time for that tree to learn it need not grow up bent over, with gentle reminders of its own roots in the earth and the trust in its own trunk, its branches may reach ever upwards. I have given up a lot to be who I truly am. Great love and friendship and the approval of others, among other things. It is strengthening to grow against the wind. I shall always continue to grow toward the blue sky and its light.

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You turn to face me now, and you look like this.
You turn away to face me again, now you look like this.
Again you turn and look again, another player and you are the same man.

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Perhaps this heart no more is capable of romantic love. Compassion, one may endeavour towards, but matters of the heart are as frozen images in time. Or it is rather that Ive chosen my values and so the rest is as determined as might the winter be also.

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I wish to make art that is more contemplative, one that the mind may wander in. Like a poem of Georg Trakyl. One that congers nothing so exact.

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An artist covers his world with lies upon lies, but only in order for him to cover them all in a greater truth.

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There are greater realms in this very world, we have yet to even imagine.

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Moving passages of sound and light. A shadow walks into its reflection. Bodies that apparently have minds all their own. Apparatuses of cement and steel. Cold, alien things. Air moves in and out of and noises emanate from inside of them. Things that move then wait and move again. This very existence, such a strange thing.

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Why do mould and rust have such wonderful colour, and the dust and dirt built up on the walls of an underground train station feels as if one has walked into a magnificent cathedral?

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Often the feeling finds me that we are living inside a zoo, one where we are both the spectator and animal.

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Distances. The multitude of stars that sink into the inky black sky above. The planets and the galaxies that echo far behind them. So very vast and overwhelming is that space. Yet the moon she sits not very far away ever listening, like a close and personal friend.

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There is a great difference between a work that has expression and one that rests in subtlety while maintaining expression. It is a reflection of the artists development of taste and leads towards a much greater expression of a painting. However subtlety or good taste in itself does not yet make it into the level of great art. A real artist can take a work those few steps farther into that place where it starts to sing with an other worldly voice. The greatest, like a Rembrandt take it even farther than this, but then I believe it is because they have given themselves over to God at that point.

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When artists decide to communicate and collectively develop their philosophical practice with each other they can begin to paint something new. Until then, unless in minor exceptions, don’t expect much creativity from the arts. You are more likely to find better recycled ideas in a Dharavi kite flying competition. You might find good artists, but genius in born through the meeting and merging of great minds.

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Begun study for new painting and already frustrated and disappointed in its conception. Do I need to challenge myself more and break through this in to another way? What is it that needs to be developed in order for it to feel right? I need to make it breathe. She has to be heaving and moaning for any degree of feeling satisfied with this. I shall let this anger boil slowly for now. I have thought about this picture for quite a time and want to make sure the conditions are right for it to come about.

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An artist communicates and thus an artist is mindful about the principles of communication itself. A culture that sanctions punishment and revenge while repressing communication and education because of taboo is unconsciously running a set up for the action it punishes.

What could be the forms governance might take in the future? Is democracy still going to be a workable ideal? How might the intermeshing of world views require a different model if an old one no longer is able to be operable? Will this escalate into world scale conflict of Neo-Feudalism/Empire policies? How could a global event such as the next ice age, nuclear escalation, neo-colonialism or a biological epidemic affect human functioning and decisions in the following century? Can our art, our thinking, show us ways to resolve the unresolveable?

This is my theory of little holes: if on were like a small mouse kept in side a jar, you would require a degree of fresh oxygen in order to maintain efficient respiration. If that jar was completely sealed, you would cease to be a living mouse. However if a small aperture were made through the surface of the jar, you would be able to place your mousey nose near it and be able to breathe enough air to live. In other words, a large hole is not required, but a minute difference; a very small hole, is the doorway between life and death. In other words, although one may ideally require a greater change in conditions in order for certain requirements to function, a small, minute change is enough to make the reverse circumstances to take place. If this analogical theory were applied to international relations, in how countries negotiate between war and peace, and all the consequences that take place from those minute circumstances, there may be the reverse outcome of what appears to be a predictable and logical condition.

Yet, how interesting the immediacy an abrupt and minute decision effects an entire outcome. Walking home in the busy rush, people believe they are giant trucks and nothing can get in their way. Just for a moment I become as they are and immediately in a race to the death cursing the opposition. So suddenly one loses all sense or care for another.

Actually, in a democratic society, we are the government. The only thing that is wrong is our negligence to take responsibility for ourselves and our society. Time to start to see there is more than just our own little lives to consider.

Drawing can be a kind of negotiation with form and context. With image and idea. It can become an unexpected development when an initial idea appears unworkable and an alternative agreement becomes an advanced creative development, out of necessity for the idea itself.

I wonder if there is a way of problem solving and thinking that cognitive psychologists might term something like analogical thinking. It is a useful way to approach problems and find novel solutions that fit in ways you might not normally expect to think of. For instance an example might be as follows: There is a point in concentration practice where the thoughts of the mind are allowed to enter again as a stream of consciousness. There is often a flood of thinking that spontaneously can be overwhelming as it is like you have kept your finger on the end of a hose and the water pressure has built up. When it is released that pressure is behind it and it can flood like a dam has broke. The curious thing is, that the way to bring a re poise again to the mind is to reintroduce concentration in a very gentle way; refocusing a little bit. If you try to bring the full force of concentration in again, the mind ends up fighting with itself and you lose it completely. I find this example interesting as I compare it to how we approach situations that are overwhelming and out of control. Sometimes things have been operating in a focused and highly effective way for a time and there is a very workable condition that proceeds this operative functioning. Then as things are moving in such a way, there can also be a kind of kick back as a result of this. I am thinking of something like advanced capitalism or the back flooding of modern technology and industry might be having as an impact on our environment and psychosocial lives. Anyway, what I mean is that instead of a reverse reactivity of force to counter such ‘flooding’ lets call it, a gentle yet direct refocusing and curbing might be the required approach. It is something that is quite easily overlooked, but if this how the mind may be utilized, then perhaps too may exterior situations be adjusted in a similar fashion.

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Sadness, darkness and an intimacy with the body’s solitude, this does winter hold within its icy embrace.

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I am sitting here looking at a small, little art work a print of some kind. It is so lovely just how a work can speak to you, be with the mind and dwell within it. The picture says nothing so direct. What it says is just what it says in its own words to the interior meaning of my own mind and heart, but in a way that speaks beyond words. Beyond direct meaning. It can mean different things, but it does mean certain things and not others. It talks to me of universes and yet also contains within it a kind of container that feels both intimate and personal. It speaks to places in my soul that I cannot quite grasp at, yet it feels so very much there. It uses a language, a strange language of subtle memories, my own and yet of others who also share the same space within. A friend to the soul, this picture.