A Ramble of Stuff. 10

The Great E (Blacky) Barlow - My Sadguru PapaWolf personified as a HS Math teacher.

BLACK is Toc-ward.
GREEN is AreBear's words.
RED is quotes. And RED as Tree
BLUE is the dated who-what-when-where

________________________

Brother

I will try to be brief - ho-ho, on the long way to it.

To begin: I realized when I was young that Color and Form were perpendicular languages - even the physical mechanics' of the eye bare this out - waving their rods and cones. And …I have always been most influenced by stories - I served a month once in art history at MIU, and even there, it only made me feverish to work. My point is I don't have much (art history) - it doesn't stick - I feel like Steven Dedalus when he said that history is a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. Therefore most of what I know had to come from raw discovery.
(In this you can see why I find the "Outsider" movement to be such a scam - everything true in art had to be realized from scratch by each worker. Deprivation and suffering are relative to each, and each worker will drink of that cup only (exactly) as much as needed. How do we know that it's needed? By the fact that we are drinking it. How do we know exactly how much to drink? By exactly how much we drink of it. I know you will say "but of course," because you come from the Big Story - the World Story - where the spine of the mountains show, and where such truths are told. Cultural evolution is the great lie of western history to mitigate the endless atrocities in its wake. "Nothing recedes like progress" [eec]).

I remember when I was a kid my father's art books were to me story books in which the consecutive pictures told very puzzling stories. I did not begin to read sentences till I was maybe ten. I avidly read the images in comics but rarely the words. So you can understand how even when I began to read in full only words that created images could hold my attention. (And by now, there are some novels I have read a silly amount of times).
Narrative is my art. And narrative is mostly about the life of Forms. Color moves through Form the way space does through matter. Form talks about matter (the world of things) and color talks about light (and the virtual photon).

I went to a rather amazing high school (such luck) - it was somewhat experimental and very much about art. There I resisted the only art teacher I would ever have, whose name sounded like "Eat Lions." Which is what I called her - I can still see her flat expression with the raised eyebrow - which is how she greeted my name for her. She roughly taught me Joseph Alber's color theories in indirect ways (which was the only way I could learn). She also taught me a visual language in words to fit my observationsin art. In high school I was not quite a human being yet, I was still an animal in disguise. But it was then under the teaching of Eat Lions that I realized the independent nature of color from form, and the interdependent nature of color to itself, and that color lives inside the eye. (And later I came to experience that my entire world lives inside my eyes).

So …back to the perpendicular languages of Form and Color. My research in art lived two lives - one was form in narrative - while the other was color, and the attempt to grok and state a transliteration of its language - its language of feeling. I was now living on the edge of the great Olympic Forest by the Elwa River - for days I would go in to the woods and bushwhack along any waterway or ridge. (It's actually hard to get lost - it being a peninsula all water leads out, and the water is everywhere [the world's only deciduous rainforest?]). To me it is the Holiest place I know. I would trek in and find a bear or elk path and hunker down and wait quietly for the woods to forget me. To be looked in the eyes by a bear was to be blessed - to smell the breath of an elk was pure Darshum.

Sitting I would meditate on a dead leaf or patch of ground and then fall into an Awe over some tiny transient color interaction before me that I knew I could never have invented by way of mind - the very close muteness of the interactions was it's power - the more the eye had to participate the more silence enlivened inside and the more subtle the energy it opened in perception - the more beauty milked.

So I concocted a traveling studio to attempt to record these live-colors where they lived - (having found that by bring them instudio they lost some of their flavor). The expanding ripples of the axis monde - concentric circles - seemed the best presentation with the most color interaction and least narrative (most color interaction and least narrative seemed to be the intuitive goal of color work). I spent a number of years making color studies in the woods - and later instudio applying them to large narrative images.

Ho-ho! All that to finally arrive at the point of this story. It was with my traveling studio, my In-woods color work, where my beloved kaleidoscope (standing in as trusty tool [thus red]) often helped out in deciding the order of the color relationships.

I saw your magnificent (breathtaking) collection of Kingly Kaleidoscopes - and have thought ever since of sending her to you. I (we) were wondered if my friend here would be acceptable to sit among those Kings - I have given her a clean coat, and fresh paint on her four directions, and she has promised to be useful.
Though her glass is scratched and her mirrors no longer completely touch (having squeezed her ribs too much) she is faithful and ToolRed - and she comes with a couple of the color-studies she gave birth to.
She has always stood on my shrine beside the striped man and bone eagle and all the Others - but to be in a gathering of her great kin would be a fine thing.

Your brother
Toc

________________________

Q: Why is art?

Art is not an idea or definable by ideas. It is an imagined reality of the heart made into form that points back to its origin - a reminder, Art is a cultural search for forms that aim at the sublime experience of Self. Art does not even belong to the art work itself, art exists in experience only - the art work is a glass for the water of your awareness, the glass holds your presence of awareness - but you allow your awareness to experience itself as art by your formal realization of it. The work itself is a vector or a set of vectors to guide the flow of awareness, the work is a hint, and above all a reminder.

Art is essentially what you bring to it.

The experience of beauty (beauty is an aiming towards perfection) found in observation was the early direction of western art. All positive forms resonate with beauty such as love and truth and light. And later; direct observational truth was found to be more experientially aligned with beauty than ideas and ideals of truth. The innate guidance towards beauty, the feeling towards beauty is measured from within - within your Self. If you ask why these things (truth - beauty - light) were and still are considered so desirable the answer would easily be because of how they feel compared to all other things - feeling is the measure - sublime is the inspiration. The direction of perfection through beauty is synonymous with the search for the self which is the source of the experience of beauty.

There is no such thing as good or bad art. To each worker in art the work is a refinement of their own awareness (a devout and sustained state of sublime failure in the face of perfection [and …all forms …fail]). To each viewer the work of art either resonates towards beauty within their awareness or it does not - (if it does not then any further judgment on it is for negative and egoic ends and is essentially meaningless). Since there is consciousness in everything (says quantum mechanics) and because everything can only be experienced in the timelessness of the very now (past and future being only ideas experienced in the now), and since only in the now does the self actually exist, then the now is the source and measure of perfection. And …in the very now even the tools themselves are perfect. Therefore all expressions carry the authority of the now, and in the now they are all perfect, (e.g.: drop all your ideas and look at a child's drawing … perfect). Good and bad are only ideas and art is most definitely not about ideas. What you look for in art already exists inside your awareness - it is your Self. The art gives you permission to immerse your self in your Self - by way of an outer form.
The only tool for experiencing anything is your awareness. If the tool is not there neither is the world (from the tools point of view). If the tool is not wholly functional - clear of obstructions (e.g.: ideas) - the experience it produces will be of poor reception - poor resonance with your Self.

Art is an acquired taste - a deep quality of silence - a kind of high-energy food for the Heart.

The History of western art is essentially about the evolution of our perception of the Self (moving towards the Self). The evolution of how-we-perceive-the-self, in which Knowing or Knowledge is the by-product of that experience - but it is not the experience. The word "Moon" and the finger pointing at the moon are not the moon. In western art what was always "The New" was an attempt at a deeper richer perception of the self expressed in form.

From the formal recognition of space in perspectives at the beginning of the Renaissance (along with the observational laws of light), to the later Impressionist, glorifying their realizations of the independent nature of color from form, and the interdependent nature of color to itself, along with the realization that color comes to life inside the eye. (True color interaction takes place in the eye as it was described best by Seurat and later by Joseph Albers).

The direction of western art began (under the influence of the Catholic Church) by worshiping ideas through the observations of things. Eventually this observation naturally turned itself around to observe itself - the observer - the primal "Thing." Art takes place in perception. "In the eye of the beholder," said each "new" art with more directness. This direction inward then gave birth, (along with both Freud and Einstein's cognitions), to cubism, futurism, dada, surrealism, abstractions and many other forms that unlocked the static ideas of time and space in perception. All these forms were aimed at opening perception to itself - to make consciousness conscious of its self.

The direction of western art intuitively leads towards the source of self - the source of "Who". Who is this "I" that makes the art and why? Early western art began defining this question by projecting art out of the self towards an objectification called God - God the Object. But each revelation turned it back on the self. Because the "Who" only speaks from the heart. And the "What" is an "inner-necessity," an impetus, towards art that has proven it will not be dissuaded by circumstance?
So who is the self? What is the self? Everything creative in civilization ultimately points at this question. (And ultimately the pointing is the answer).

So from Abstract Art came Abstract Expressionism which attempted to eliminate all possible narrative time references in order to experience the self without associative thoughts - in a "desert of feeling," said Malevich. A desert devoid of things (thoughts) where only deep "feeling" lives. Abstract Expressionism recognized that concepts and thoughts stood in the way of the total perceptual experience of the self. And finally the Minimalist - who attempted to remove their own subjective-ness from the work - then said that it was up to the viewer to bring the self's vast recognition of beauty (perfection) to seeing, and that this perfection of beauty can be perceived through anything because it already resides in the viewer awareness.

After this Western art's research splintered into fragmenting paths continuing the research of self. It was endlessly fragmented because essentially all that was needed to be said was said.
With the research clearly stated the conclusion is that the perception of perfection comes from within - from within your self - and it was always within your own ability to see It in the world. Thus you are responsible for bringing perfection into your awareness and applying It to what you see - not just to objects intended as art but to everything.

Art is a reminder.

Q: So where does this leave western art?

In the Now, and inclusive of all forms - realizing the Self and directly observing the world within that realization. To make every gesture of perception carefully responsive to the Self. Recognizing that every slightest expression is a dialogue in love with your Self - the Self speaking to Itself.
And recognizing that "the medium is the message"- and the message is: "I Am."

________________________

Two new Synopsis for V6.3 and V7.1

Kids of Lower Utopia: Letters from the Front Lines.V6.No In this series of drawings - this book, I am drawing a sequential 55 page story. Each page measures 30" x 50", and all are done primarily with a .3 mec-pencil on paper. In this, my 8th book I am drawing, through the lens of Zen Non-dualism, an allegorical dream in which my heroine; RiverScout Finnagain, travels through archetypal stages of realizations to finally arrive at her Self. This story couldn't be told better in another medium (nothing holds more directly the silent life of observation-in-light as a metaphor undisguised) then the pencil. My drawings are spoken in a careful language of conscious vectors summing into "still-points" where life's attention waits gathering silence. My pages are a sequence of images in a formal proximity that initiates a narrative (inductive-deductive) flow which solicits from the viewer intuitive leaps to bridge the space between pages - leaps through their own non-linear space of Self. Art is a metaphor for being fully conscious, it mimics Self-Realization by seeing so thoroughly, so seemingly instantaneously "Now" that the viewer is suspended in "Aesthetic Arrest" and experiences observation free of thought. This is my Work. ("Aesthetic Arrest" -Steven Dedalus - by way of James Joyce -TPotAaAYM)

The Single Songs of Schizotopia: An Anthology of Lower Utopia V7 No1. This book is made from a collection of single page comics that in their originals combine digital-ink and pencil-drawing - measuring 26" x 40."
A collection of tongue-in-cheek sutras under the influence of humor from a place in the Heart called Lower Utopia. Lower Utopia is a name for the place that is the most inward edge of the Image Nation within (of which the last and farthest city on the frontier of the Total-Unknown-Universe is called Schizotopia -- because There - everyone is You). ). In the country of Lower Utopia and in the city of Schizotopia where all the art in the world is made, the people live in love with Love and practice Love on everything. The deeper you go into Lower Utopia the closer all the different stories become. Closer to being the One story about recognizing the Sacred within until It is without.
This book is about the sweet self mockery of a worker in consciousness (living in a transitional time when the world is choosing between planetary annihilation and inner peace). These pages are a series of softly comic spiritually surreal metaphors that present the juxtaposition of the inner in the outer world.

________________________

Pal

I think it is absolutely vital that you create a new piece for august. Using your core statement last night. The real question begins with "I," instead of "I think everyone is sleeping" and I feel so guilty about America's prosperity……. The real question is why am "I" sleeping? When did "I" start sleeping? Why do "I" feel guilty? What is the story of your guilt? Every time you use these words or express these concerns they sound like the beginning of a confession.
The confession of your sleep, your guilt, (but not about America).

Study poverty before America even existed. Before America there is a two thousand year old recorded history of poverty and brutality. The Human condition. This is the reason the most cherished heroes that humanity claims are the ones who attempted to solve this eternal human condition (King Arthur, Buddha. Jesus, Lao Tzu, Shankara, Gandhi, King, Marley, and I would like to think that Bobby Kennedy was heading that way). Love solves all equations. Understand poverty and brutality outside of the context of America.

Nations have attempted what you proposed last night (Russia, China, and the Kaman-Rouge are the most well known of these, with hideous results). Controlling all consuming, sharing all goods, with the results being three of the most oppressive, dehumanizing regimes in history. Why? Because governments do not change the human condition. In communism the end result was that ultimately citizens were not allowed to even consume their own ideas, thinkers, artists, poets, and intellectuals were shot.
Consumption is a cellular condition. Life is all consuming. Life is the Face-of-Glory that Shiva wears in his dreads. It is a monster, if it has nothing outside to eat, it will eat its self. You are attempting to eat everyone else when you should more honestly be eating your self.

Guilt, sleep, consuming, wanting, having…… your story. Put your name in America's place. Use the word I instead of them. And tell the real story.

________________________