A SOFT RAIN MOOD.

On Wednesday, November 5, 2014, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

Elusive mystery sublime.

Sombre, soulful, distant, grey.

Far horizons under rain.

~~~~

The living planet has changing modes or moods, that sweep across her surface like the subtle flicker of expressions across a human face.

These ever changing expressions are not simply ‘out there’, in a world separate from ourselves, but are modes of the Earth-mind, simultaneously reflected on the soul-screen consciousness of her sentient creatures.

Timeless, archetypal, and indivisible from the whole soul presence of the planetary Goddess, (being by definition she who gives birth to everything, everywhere, forever.)

 

VISUALIZATION:

While assembling a few specific words to evoke memory in imagination, i also did a small pencil sketch, only three inches square, to make it exactly visual. Pencils are perfect for visualizing.

Somehow, working that small, concentrates the focus of imagination. Feeling from within, softly coaxing and allowing an image which wishes to emerge in form. It’s a receptive, perhaps more than a projective process.

The pencil draws without pressure, on paper. The imagination draws on memory impressions. I feel my way into an imagined place, seeing into the subtle shorthand as if i was really there. Invoking a situation i would like to be in. Pinpointing precise characteristics, tonal relationships.

Most people think rain is a nuisance and it can seem so unless you’re dying of thirst, and that, ‘vision’ has something to do with opticians and short-sightedness. Whereas, what manifested here from nowhere in particular, was envisioned.

FOUNDATION.

Transpose the seedling idea into a larger pot, in this case a canvas, primed to the right degree between rough and smooth, relative to the detail and direction of brushwork intended.

I transferred all spatial relationships from the sketch to the canvas by measured marks on the edge of a cigarette paper packet, proportionately into the equivalent in inches.

For example, it’s important how high or low the horizon is, because that’s the eye level in the landscape. The higher the horizon the higher we are above ground, the lower it is, the closer our viewpoint is to the ground. It had to be exact. An original sketch often has features worth preserving.

Grey: A sober substance that expresses tonal density. Neutral and dispassionate with a kind of dignified gravity, unattached to any particular feelings of colour vibration. The gravitas of tonality. Degrees on the tonal spectrum between the void of oblivion and the plenitude of lightness. Tonality is an emotive factor.

The same applies to the tone of a colour, but with grey it’s not attached to any predominant area of feeling. Grey is like a background foil that serves to enhance the qualities of any colour it’s put next to by being neutral.

Combining neutral with primary and secondary colours has a lot of possibilities. It exercises an element of restraint in the all too common tendency to indulge in too many oversweet colours at once, thereby losing the theme. There are millions of examples of this on the internet.

It’s all about relationships, and ‘too many cooks can spoil the broth.’ Unless you prefer orgies to mutual understandings. I have explored the purest of combinations of primary and secondary colours in abstract and geometrical formations previously. What i’d call naked and intimate colour harmonies. But harmony is still about natural optimal mutual balance.

For anybody who thinks that landscape painting is somehow opposed to abstraction, this one small example is a lead-in to the sensual intuitive science which it is. But it’s about feeling-tone, and memory impressions, and what most epitomizes those impressions.

I’m focusing here on the subtle aesthetic properties of grey by contrast with popular prejudice. Something quite distinct from, ‘grey clothes are boring, grey streets are drab, grey skies are depressing’, etc.

It’s in the perception of the beholder, whether or not you bring love to something just as it is. Or whether you bring concepts of judgement and preformed prejudice.

Rocks and mountains are grey, skies are grey for a large part of the year, many birds and animals including cats are grey and we love to stroke them. So there’s nothing inherently negative about any of that

FOUNDATION (continued.)

So, i painted a neutral grey, positioning everything in its right relationship, and everything ‘is’ relationship. I learn much of relevance to relationship through painting. It’s not as if art only pertains to ‘an art form’ and not to life as a whole.

The truth that everything is inter-related and inter-dependent, which is a whole learning of non-duality, the one insight that can stop us screwing up the world we are one-with so badly.

The fundamental insight that divisions don’t divide, they unify. As in, ‘who’s fence is it, mine or my neighbour’s?’ Silly question, and not one that need cause offence, though it often does, and globally. Who’s national border is it?

Ours, right. We all have difference in common, it’s a mutual agreement. Distinctness is the surest sign of underlying unity. There’s never a ‘this’ without a ‘that’, and being spell bound by the magic of words we choose one and reject the other and think that’s what we are, when it’s a mutual relationship.

ILLUMINATION.

Enlivening the panel of grey sky, breathing life of the memory of clouds into it. From slow moving overcast brooding density down to distant horizons. Creating aerial space in full spectral distance. Softly modifying and blending nuances of authentic atmospherics.

Atmospheric means no harsh contrast must leap out, nothing too arbitrary. Attending to this, watchfully, mindful of distance, forms unfold organically by themselves. Bringing farsighted hypnotic horizons, where the slow motion action is, into full binocular view. Modulating appropriate muted colour tones of far off fields, illuminating tree tops in a rare ray of late light.

 

CULMINATION.

Accumulating layers of illumination, miniscule modification, fine-tuning, following, flowing with, and filling in the filigree of implied underlying organic web work, funnelling down to culmination and completion. Ten hours in all, not counting preparation.

Or the many contemplative tea and smoke breaks. Sipping in sweet silence of solitude, scanning every centimetre for anomalies. Anomalies in the flow, small but glaring glitches, calling for further attention and reintegration. From the viewpoint of a perfectionist squint with a night owl’s laser vision into the sensed but unseen. There’s always more lurking in there.

Till it ultimately winds down, to the relief of let-go, let it be, satisfactory enough to matt varnish, blend and homogenize any subtle glitch or glare to photograph, and leave well alone, looking long, cup in hand.

I wished for a way to share

and say, under clouds of soulful grey,

far horizons under rain.

Obscures a line of distant hills,

merging neutral tones of earth,

timelessness beyond the world.

Fields of melancholy grey,

mystically turn away.

A half remembered ancient dream.

~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker~

Art:

  A SOFT RAIN MOOD, martin law, Nov 2014