The Inspiration
If we come from the Divine, the Earth has taken us and become our foster mother. The older we get, the further removed from our Divine union we grow. The Earth gives us love and hate, marriages, jobs, cars, children, electric and water bills, mortgages, and everything that concerns life. We are so busied we do not think "in the moment" nor have time to reflect on the meaning of life and of our immortality. Death is "the end". We try not to talk of it. Children cry when they first learn the concept of death. Then, we learn to endure and live. When death comes, is that it, lights out? Are we like the TV set when you turn it off. The screen is blazing with light, then it is shut down to a mere flicker pinpoint of light - then puff. Total blackness. There is no physical proof of eternal life. Hundini hasn't come true with vow to let his loved one contact her if he still exists. We have the Bible and Christianity and all the other religions that conflict in various ways. Wars are raised. Deaths and suicidal bombings are done in the name of a religion. Today news media seeks the worst things that have happened around the world to bombard our airways and senses. The predominate art I found in many of the art galleries around the world is called post-moderate destructivism. A typical example of this style is a canvas painted like the color of a grocery bag. Scrawled on the canvas looks like an autopsy or scene from CSI or the last scenes of Braveheart when William Wallace is being tortured and cries out. There are screws and nails and hammers and all sorts of devices used on the body in these paintings. They seem to say, "LOOK" just insides here, no God, no spirit, no afterlife. We live in a world of torture and then we die. It's the most glooming, dark, despairing visual creation that can be created. This is in a lot of the galleries. People buy these to hang on the walls? Where do these paintings go? I assume if they aren't selling the galleries would not carry them.......... So, I walkout the gallery and wonder what kind of reaction I am going to get with my style of paintings when I submit them. I can't think of a more opposite art to my own than this modern type of art. Sigh.
The world is our foster mother. We are living in a world that seems to be moving faster and faster. Two jobs and keeping a family, there is hardly any time to think at all.
The city has become our new foster mother. We never touch the earth because of the concrete. We never see the stars because of the streetlights. We have removed ourselves from the most elemental experiences of being alone with nature. Before there was structured religions and this modern world, there was simply man and nature. Remember the first time you saw the ocean as a child or the mountains? Remember the awe and how your imagination soared......and how this was like the first time you start to conceptualize eternity IS eternity that never stops - like the ocean stretching before you or the sky itself? When standing on a mountaintop or on the beach with the water and sand slipping between your toes............. I feel this elemental simple thought - I am One with all of this. Our flesh is made of the elementals we see around us. We are made from stardust. Out of nothing came all this. Then for me comes this feeling along with the Oneness - a kind of relationship - like the tree, the ocean, the bird, the dirt, us - we are all magical particles whirled together from this great magic wand. In this moment of feeling of Oneness and relatedness, comes Love. We are all family, not strangers walking along a New York street, but all - everything - is weaved together from the same cosmic soup. Before man can create anything, there is thought behind it. Could this be so with this universe we live? We have finite minds that can not understand the infinite. Seeping through dreams and visions, flickers of immortality and God do come. Sigmund Freud said religion was a way to cope with neurosis. Could it be that inside of God creating man into his image, it was Man who created God in his image to better understand and conceive of this great infinite power? Inklings of ideas, glimmers of immorality flickering like shadows on the walls of our conscious minds rise. Some men became prophets foreseeing the coming of a child and visions of Revelations. A kingdom is moved into action from a king's fear of a child king of kings to be born. Then, Jesus is born. He fills us with hope of life ever-after. We are all children of God. Those that life by the moral code of God and pledge their love to him, will be given life eternal. After Christ's, death, religions splintered, while Christianity was born. Other religions grew. Many clash. Thousands die over holy wars. New religions will continue to be born.
All we know for certain is that we are born and we die. Christians believe that Jesus returned from the dead. Besides the words of the witnesses, there has been no proof of eternal life or God. We have to accept on faith. The child born in America and taught religion will as strongly believe in it as they would born in another country and taught from a mother's knee what their concept of their religion was. Does one religion have the right to claim they are the correct way and the other is wrong?
Can we find some common ground most of us can agree? Can we at least walk out of the cave and stand on the hill, look around, and agree we are all made of the same material? Can we say that if we are of the same stuff, that if it there is a Creator, we share a similar family bond as brother and sisters?
I choose to have faith in Christianity. I rather be wrong in believing that Christianity does exist, than to believe it doesn't and find out too late that it really does. I can't explain why I feel an essence of love when I am at "One" with nature. I feel at "One" in nature when I am "in the moment" of natural surroundings. At these moments, I feel an almost "childlike awe" or memory of awe and wonder that this great beautiuful universe is unbonding and ever expanding and alive - LIVING - and I am made of the same particles as the air, the sea, the stars. This Living Spirit is what I feel is Love. And Love is what I feel is the Divine.
Squiggleism - A living, vibrant, moving element of the Divine. Squiggles are in all that exists. (Similar, as I've been told recently as a larger magnification of the new physics theory of "Superstrings")
Most of my paintings have a source of light in them. This represents the Divine. From the Divine the squiggles are born into the world. Each squiggle in a way is like a sound or note of vibration. Many believe that out of Nothing God came and spoke his name. The sound of his name vibrated and began to slow in vibration until physical things began to be created like molecules/atoms of gas slow in vibration to form liquid, and slower vibration makes it ice. This vibration comes from God's voice. Each squiggle is like a note of God's sound. One way I try to use my paintings are like turning forks. If you flick one turning fork and cause it to vibrate and make a sound, it effects a nearby turning fork that is absolutely still. My painting is a turning fork that is vibrating. When its image is captured in the eye, I hope its vibration stirs and sounds a note - God's note - somewhere within them. Colors have vibrational states, as light itself.
With my art I seek to break out of the "foster mother city" concrete and lights and grab a piece of nature. With this picture of nature, I seek to unveil the Divine's Essence - it's Living Spirit - through color and vibration. Every painting is a song. Every stroke of paint is a musical note, playing God's sound. It's like when you are absolutely quiet, lying in bed, you can hear that tiny tinny buzz - that is the sound of you. A squiggle is but a vibration of the sound of God.
When a person looks at my painting I hope to create within them a sense of jubilation and serenity. Be happy that there is a God; be happy God is love.
An eternal life in Heaven awaits us. It is a place of all Love.
(A minor note that is secondary in a way - but maybe not when I think of it. After my car accident my physical peace and changed forever. I think no one put it better than what Stephen King said in a court room trail about an accident where he was rundown by a truck. I am only paraphrasing now, but he said something like, his serenity and peace was robbed forever. Every waking moment he now felt pain. That is the way with me. When you have pain constantly, you just have to live with it. Like hearing this annoying sound, eventually it becomes kind of lost in the background, but it is always there. I discovered a secret way of making my pain disappear. It's painting. When I paint and listen to XM radio Audio Visions, I am transcended. I am painting God's vibrational strokes and my pain disappears. These landscapes are my heavenscapes. They are my places without pain.
It was this poem by William Wordsworth that steered me to my inspiration. This poem touches the core of my heart and inspiration of painting.
.INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD I
THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
II
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
III
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;--
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
Shepherd-boy!
IV
Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:--
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
--But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
V
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
VI
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.
VII
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his "humorous stage"
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.
VIII
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,--
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
IX
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest--
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
X
Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
XI
And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
1803-6.
|