Bound Together

Sometimes my artwork goes into dark places. Creativity lives there just as it does in the lofty realms. The domains are bound together; one informs the other.

I have prepared to submit photo images to a juried show called Dreams. A work re-emerged from my past that I have remade. It has dark elements, but also redemptive ones. It could be a symbol of madness, or claustrophobia, or heartache. Or it could be salvation, enlightenment or instinct. The viewer brings their own interpretation. Intrigue and mystery live here.

I have to be able to bring my brush to hell as well as heaven. Both are creation.

Hands

 Hands are essential to human life. How many poems have been written about them? Hardly any. Yet, think about it; we use our hands to make the world we live in. We grasp tools, drive vehicles and go places, feed ourselves, express ourselves, make music and art, write, climb, lift, caress and make love, hold babies . . . hands give us mobility, life and progress.

In art, hands are among the most difficult part of human form to convey. They are complicated appendages.

Appreciate your hands!

Walk A New Path

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. -George Bernard Shaw

The best art allows us to see with our own eyes, but brings us into revelation. Our vision and perception gains strength. A chord is touched inside of us so that we say, “Aha.”

When it goes public, a piece of art is owned by all, so to speak, and open to a myriad of interpretations. From that time forward it is objective and subjective both. The risk an artist takes is that he may value his work highly, but the public does not.

When a new movement in art comes along, it often is met with resistance and some ridicule. It asks the viewer to take a different path from the norm, and often, the viewer says, “You foolish artist, I know what good art is. You can't fool me! The tried and true is apparent to all, so why should I go down this suspicious path with you?” In modern times, this is what happened to the first impressionists, and much later, also the abstract expressionists. First ridicule and resistance, and then through persistence, passion and devotion, a warming occurred with people. In these cases, it took years along with the slow gaining of important allies in the art business, and then the public was swayed. Now there is adulation. Just look at Van Gogh's life.

The same happens in social movements such as women's suffrage, native people's rights, race equality etc. Also, the world's great religions were often met with fierce resistance when they first appeared.

I have started creating art that is a departure from my past. It just seems to be the time, and I have the passion and will to walk a new path. I have not lost anything, I can always go back. Recently, I have been constructing my paintings as much as painting them. They begin with an idea that is fed from my unconscious and I go from there. There are two now, with more coming. The finished peieces are in the public realm since people have seen them—mostly online. I am not showing them in a gallery at this time. Being public they are both objective and subjective now.

As an example of how this type of art can evoke a wide range of subjective responses, I will tell of the interpretations from different people as they viewed my last piece. The main parts are: two dolls—one standing and one falling, a niche where one doll stands and one has fallen from, a window, an open book turned to a chapter titled, “On Love”, and a hand seeming to come from thin air and holding the book open.

A close friend of mine was the first to see it complete, and as we discussed it she formulated a story that the two dolls were actually the same person. She is both standing and also toppled over and entering the realm of the book; falling into the story of love while the Hand of God holds the book open.

Another person said that at first glance it made her feel like someone is trying to hold onto LOVE.

Someone else wrote on Facebook: “People told me to be 'perfect'. Perfect like a doll... Then, some people gave me books leading to imperfect worlds... I took your hand so that I could grow into something I would never have imagined...”

Another Facebook friend wrote: “This is a dream world, and perhaps it has a touch of adobe wall of Santa Fe and old walls of places you've traveled. There is hope and life coming through the top window, so close yet set apart from the innocent girl, the fairy tale girl, with the perfect outfit, part of whom has lost control and fallen,(or perhaps some inner part of the dream has fallen) almost, perhaps it will be a surprise to her, into a book, which seems to be orderly - can't see the title. She doesn't know it but part of her falls into some type of order that this hand, old as the wall, ancient like the soul, has touched. The figure at the top might be mourning for loss, while the hand feels the order of that book, not reading it or holding it, but feeling it. It is a left hand of the intuitive, inner self. Some dream perhaps fallen yet into a book. The hatted doll is in a bit of a precarious position but so close to the window of hope. Perhaps she represents external fantasies (letting go. Just a few thoughts. She is hatted like the men you painted, but here is a feminine aspect, perhaps an inner child waiting to be helped down or through that window. the book is quite balanced...I mean the two pages, like yin and yang. Perhaps the hand knows in this book is the balance. If I want to trip on it, it could be a person, with the doll at the head, the doll and the hand the arms and the book the feet. The head then would have part in life and hope and part in image, possibly fantasy or a young female sense, the hands part letting go and part holding on to the feet holding to balance, truth. But I wouldn't want to project onto it...(ha, ha, smile).”

And now, I confess that my original conception was for the two dolls to represent a sort of fate for two different people. One who would stand firm in life, bearing witness to the window of life and the Book of Love held by the hand of destiny (or God), and the other who falls.

I like all the descriptions and they all work! Art is objective and subjective. That is the fun.

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. -Pablo Picasso

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. -Albert Einstein

Delirium

All it takes is one look to cause brief delirium. I am talking about tulips, and the effect they have on an innocent eye. Okay, maybe I am too sensitive, especially since I am an artist and get easily intoxicated by color. But tulips have that WOW factor.

I was driving somewhere the other day and while rounding a bend in the road, a mass of tulips stood bright and gay in the traffic median and captured my attention. Just two weeks ago the area was bare, and I thought, how did they know to bloom? Flowers hold intelligence in their essence. The tulips bloomed in unison, not haphazardly.

I wonder how anyone disbelieves in God. Intelligence is everywhere and our minds are constantly busy deciphering it. We are continually dumbfounded by our surroundings, and only little by little unravel the mysteries to get at truth and discover the verities. In short, everything that exists has been created with intelligence. And when we consider the infinite vastness of space, as well as turning inward to see intelligence inside atoms, it is enough to make a being fall to his knees and bow his head before The One Who Is The Supreme Creator. (Also see my earlier blog: A Marvel)

While I was traveling in Europe, in Venice, Italy, I met a French woman and we became great friends. She is a professor of art and I am an artist, so despite some language barriers, we hit it off. I went to visit her in France, and then she came to Spain to visit me while I lived there. She is an intellectual and has written books about art. Her mind is keen and loves to engage in philosophy and psychology. While I believe in God, she is an avowed atheist and said that man creates God because man needs something to believe in. One morning when we were together, I spoke aloud and gave thanks for the beautiful day. She said, “Steven, you must thank yourself. You give the day to yourself.” I chuckled and then felt slightly inflamed. “How can you say that?” I retorted. “I did not create the sun that shines upon the earth. And I have not created the day in which I participate as witness and small actor on the stage.”

Baha’u’llah, speaking as the tongue of God said:

O CHILDREN OF THE DIVINE AND INVISIBLE ESSENCE!
Ye shall be hindered from loving Me and souls shall be perturbed as they make mention of Me. For minds cannot grasp Me nor hearts contain Me.



In five days I leave for Paris, France and my French friend said she will come see me. My dear "Heidi of the Mountains" said she must come too because she has to be near me and can't stand a whole month apart. After five days in Paris, we go to Morocco. Heidi stays until May 13 and I continue for another two weeks, going on to Barcelona, Spain, and then back home to Santa Fe.

Kaleidoscope World

Do you ever ponder infinity, or do you just think, why bother, it is impossible to comprehend. Human beings like to measure. They create units for everything. Time and space is broken down into discernable increments in order that we may manage our environment. Society is based on common assumptions of the physical world. When we make an appointment, we are agreed when the both of us will arrive. When we figure how far to drive from here to there, we can gather how long it will take.
I am not entirely comfortable living within these man-made articles. Rather, I like to lose boundaries and flow in the infinite.

The other day, my girlfriend and I had a deep conversation about our relationship and she confided that she worried that in my traveling I could forget her. I know what she means because I have confided that when I go on trips, I like to “disappear into the matrix”. I lose a sense of self, flowing and melding with my immediate universe. It is difficult to describe the freedom and élan I sense. Barriers fall so that I am not “the other”, but have become “disappeared”. Then, I am not of a particular race, creed, economic position, nationality, or anything separate, but more like a pulse from the sun or moon or from the middle of the earth. It is a meditation of sorts and a forgetting of past, and an exquisite openness to the miraculous present, while trusting that the future will take care of itself. Heidi of the Mountains demands that I always remember her and not lose track for even a minute. The closer we become, the more I realize my wandering days might become circumscribed. Fortunately, she is as adventurous as me, so we can explore together. Yet, the wind has no partner, and I like to be the wind over the earth; unconstrained and even capricious. I like surprise to the extent that I am a surprise to myself.

When I observe fashion, style, business, the structures of society, I can see the inventive usefulness that is purported, and yet I do not want to be embroiled in temporal intrigues. I can appreciate the adventures, and understand that I take my part, but my philosophy is that it is all part of what I call THE DREAM. Civilization and the external cosmos are like a grand kaleidoscope. A kaleidoscope is a circle of mirrors containing loose, colored objects such as beads or pebbles and bits of glass. As the viewer looks into one end, light entering the other end creates a colorful pattern, due to the reflection off the mirrors. Turning the object mixes the ingredients and causes an almost endless display of effects. It is a bit of a dream. And this is how I see the events of life unfolding. Endless, surprising pictures unfold from the bits of life colliding, shaping, destroying and reformulating to become new phenomenon. And do you think there is an observer? In a sense, we are all observers, but can see so little of the miraculous, breathtaking pictures that unfold. We partake of an infinitesimal fraction of the spectrum. Of course, the less we think of the infinite, the bigger even small things become, and people can have heated arguments over mundane trivia.

The kaleidoscope turns moment by moment, always changing, producing new arrangements for us to ponder and explore. This earthly consciousness and viewing  is what Buddhist’s call Saṃsāra. The word has its origin in ancient India, to refer to the physical world, or family, or the universe. In modern parlance, saṃsāra refers to a place, set of objects and possessions, but originally, the word referred to a process of continuous pursuit or flow of life. In accordance with the literal meaning, the word should either refer to a continuous stream of consciousness, or the continuous but random drift of passions, desires, emotions, and experiences. This turning of a wheel, producing new and different effects, is like the kaleidoscope. I see it as dream. The great unchanging reality is the core, the axis upon which everything revolves. The axis is reality; everything else is but a dream.

A Marvel

During my years of University study I took a course in philosophy, and I remember a day in class when the professor became quite animated during a treatise on whether God exists or not. He held up a diagram of the human eye and explained that such a complex invention begged certainty that only God could create such a marvel. I agree.

The human eye is enormously complicated and efficient in receiving raw data. About 40 components make up the system, including retina, pupil, iris, cornea, lens and optic nerve. The retina for instance, has approximately 137 million special cells that respond to light and send messages to the brain. The light impressions are translated into electric impulses and sent to the brain via the optic nerve. Then, the visual cortex interprets the pulses to color, contrast, depth, etc., which allows us to see “pictures” of our world. The eye captures so much information that the brain can interpret up to 1.5 million pulse messages a milli-second. No computer even comes close.

If anything were to go even slightly wrong in the creation of eyes, they would fail. Yet time and again, since the beginning of human life, mankind has been given the incredible gift of sight. It does not happen by accident, but rather by plan. If we think fairly about this one aspect of the human creation, we must admit that a Creator devised and implements it. Furthermore, all the best minds of humanity could not replace a single eye . . . the most we have been able to do in an empty eye socket is put in a glass orb that has no power of sight whatsoever. No, only God can create eyes. It cannot be “accidental” or by “chance”.

“To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree possible.” Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

Thank You

I am in the habit of giving thanks, and at bedtime, always speak out loud before sleeping so that I hear the words, “thank you.” I think of the day I have just experienced, and then say, “I have no complaints.” Of course, I am speaking to God. I have a dearly beloved friend who is atheist who told me “you are thanking yourself, because of what you give to yourself.” There is truth in what she says, because I choose how to think and therefore experience accordingly. But in giving thanks, I am acknowledging the great gift of life, and I know that I have not given life to myself. No, everything has been given to me—the world of nature which is safe within regulated laws, my body that exists in nature and time, and the doors of perception through which I understand . . . these have been given to me and I could not have invented this. I am an infinitesimal part of an infinite universe which is beyond the grasp of humankind. Maybe that is why some throw up their hands and say God does not exist. What they are saying is it is impossible to know, so why even try? But I surmise that this is lazy thinking and that a simple solution is to acknowledge that the cosmos we live in is a creation and a creation must have a creator; a priori.
In my studio I have been spending my hours working on printing some of my 30,000 photographs. I am choosing portraits of people from around the world and then printing them on canvas; larger than life size. They are then mounted on board and I have been using an old painting method to cover them with encaustic; a hot wax and resin combination that fuses colors as it hardens. It is experimental, and I have no income from this now, but this year, I hardly have income anyway. I do not complain, but give thanks for the excitement and adventure of having opportunities to explore each day, and especially consciousness.