Standing Rock.

               'Water Is Life'.  

A few selected paintings in support of all the people gathered to protect the Missouri river which serves 17 million people, and protect the land and sacred burial grounds already desecrated by the unlawful construction of a huge oil pipeline project, almost completed, without consultation and against the wishes of the Lakota people's birthright to live on and care for all life in that area despite their treaties that were broken as always.

There has long been a traditional prophecy that if when the black snake crosses the land it is not stopped then the world will end.
Thousands of people from many nations continue to gather there in peaceful  non-violent and prayerful support, not retaliating to the lawless corporate, corporeal and literal abuse, injury, and needless desecration.  

Despite media attempts to distort and suppress coverage of the true situation, aware people around the world are watching via internet as well as demonstrating peacefully and colourfully their solidarity and support for the growing gathering at Standing Rock, North Dakota. Quite evidently little or nothing has changed since Wounded Knee.  This is a wake up call for the world.

Informally and still fumbling ineptly with the idiosyncrasies of computer tech which seems reluctant to heed my instructions, i thought to re-release a small selection of relevant paintings as a smoke signal of solidarity with 'the people' and in reverence and celebration for the sacred integrity of earth, air, fire, water, all life interdependent, interconnected, whole, healthy, abundant.

        
         1. Weenyon Wahkon.  'Holy Woman. 2008.  
           


                     

        
         2.  A Love Of Leaves.  2012.   

                   
                      

                       3.  Sacred Sunrise.  2010.

          
             4.  Kisses the wolf.  2009.

            

                             

                               5.  Indian Sunrise.  2003.

                                

Though i only seconds ago found how to get the cursor to stay where i put it long enough,while font sizes mutate by themselves and my layout is not what i intended, this is, A PRAYER FOR STANDING ROCK. WATER IS LIFE. 

The Lakota word for water, 'mni', is pronounced  'm'nee', which means 'me sacred.' ~

        

        ><  ><  >< . ><  ><  ><  

             Martin Rainbowmaker

               

Night Sky Event

Perhaps nobody noticed, an uncharacteristic break in the regular flow of previous blog posts, due to factors too convoluted and numerous to describe.  Meanwhile attempting to remedy and reorient, and involving me trying to get a handle on the blog posting process by myself from scratch.

No doubt simple for those with a left brain aptitude who are otherwise familiar with the digital process and i've never claimed to be one of them.  On the contrary, i feel to be on the other end of the spectrum, and the logic, if that's what it is, of most things technical has tended to feel 'more than a little alien'.  However, in retrospect, i completed the task satisfactorily in one stretch of five hours, with zero instruction or assistance, despite  some annoying idiosyncratic self-contradictory anomalies inherent in the robotic system itself.


Then just today, after trying to familiarize with the Blogger process and making slight but slow progress, my current digital camera abruptly ceased to function and not even switch off or on.  The third of its kind in a row to do that , in barely more than the same number of times.
       

      
         
However, in the meantime, my mode of painting shifted into a radically different realm of uncharted territory.  A natural enough and common occurrence whether temporary or otherwise.  Resulting in three paintings, the first called 'Improvisation', and two with the title, 'Night Sky Event', numbers 1 and 2.

Improvisation is the one with the ochre and pink variations on 'cup and ring' semi-circle symbols relating to fertilization from above, containment and gestation, and birth.  Happening in an imaginary spatial environment or dimension, but they're all improvised, starting from no fixed concept.

Next came Night Sky Event. No.1. on a slightly larger canvas, but they're all fairly small.  A random organic event, across a night sky, and which also went through minute modifications in detail, colour tone (i changed the blue around the forms three times), and in overall feeling till it was integrated, a magical mythic event above a moonlit landscape.

Night Sky Event. No.2.  Extending deeper into the mode of blue, with a lunar element shining through.  Softening the other elements into a higher vaulted dome of psychic firmament.  The colour tones muted and pacified into a vast infinity.  Peppered with traces  and filaments of webs of stars.  The dark earth likewise flecked with distant lights of habitation.  Unlike the artificial robotic linear logic, an organic excursion solely and soulfully into the right intuitive realm of refined feeling.           

                    ****  *****  ****                               Martin Rainbowmaker.

PETALS OF PAINT

Needed to paint something, just to keep in touch with the process as being potentially playful and ideally therapeutic.  While not feeling quite up to the challenge for reasons planetary and personal.  I could just as well play with paint for itself without a subject and see what develops organically, since all painting is about colour, form, and relationship, with or without a subject.

 Yet i have all these flower photos, taken specifically for their vibrancy of colour, intended as a catalyst to shift my mode of mind to a lighter level of vibration.  The degree of detail involved in drawing any one of them being admittedly and typically daunting and could be quite taxing,

Besides, previous paintings became progressively intensively perfectionist in attention to minutest detail and overall integration to the point of tightness even.  Which can be fine and often what it takes, if you feel up to it that is.

So, for the record, despite feeling 'out of sorts' , lack of sufficient sleep for weeks, too much inconclusive and questionable internet information, uncertainty in trying to remedy a common ailment by natural means.  Toxic trails turning summer skies to a grey haze and the populace oblivious, i coated a canvas in layers of white primer.

With the vaguest of light guidelines, a bold Chinese brush loaded with liquid pink, started out loose as it's possible to be, a bit wobbly even to the point of sloppy. Wondering how, if, and when, i'd paint or even write intelligibly again.  The pink, possibly the singular link to the preservation and perpetuation of passion.

Then, filling in the foliage and botanical profusion in similar random fashion, dodging niggling exactitude.  Only later with a fine point brush, modifying, delineating highlight and shadow, making structural sense and relationship in three-dimensional space.

Bit of a trip to say the least, and something to focus on over a couple of evenings and more, with the intention at least to not make hard work out of it.  Managing somehow to loosely tie it all together into a credible momentary impression of a sunny garden.  

The bright acid-pink of the actual flowers not possible to duplicate with acrylic paint, so had to imply it in the play of light through petals.  It is what it is, and that's just a brief description of how it came to be, and hopefully of some help to anyone attempting such a thing.

Since then, i took a necessary break from this particular discipline and produced two paintings of a radically different and free form nature going into uncharted territory starting without subject matter other than 'something' unknown happening in an imagined space.  That's a challenge of another order, not knowing where it may or may not lead to, tentatively fingers crossed watch this space. ~

 ~~~~   ~~~~   ~~~~
Martin Rainbowmaker.
         

FLOWERS FOR JOY

Anyone who is aware must surely agree, the world’s going through a multitude of radical upheavals on all levels. Everyone experiences it in their own unique way, according to priorities and perspective and individual circumstance.

Astrologically and personally, Saturn’s transit to Saturn colours the lens i’m looking through currently. Or i could say, an added ingredient of joyful colour is what’s needed and i feel a bit like a barometer.

Perhaps the planet’s passing through a purgatorial purge process of purification. Intensification of vibration bringing buried miasmas to the boil to burst like bubbles. Surveying the scene on the surface it certainly seems so.

As with any birth or rebirth on earth the waters burst forth first, and while the world burns for the new to be born, i’m just fiddling with words and language in a free-form verbal doodle as one might sing simply for the sound without it being a song, and anyway, what’s the difference between a doodle and a yodel?

And while it might sound like somebody who’s lost the plot, just take a look at the kind of world we’ve got, where words are widely wielded as weapons, while these ones don’t even have an axe to grind let alone a sharp point to put forward.

While worldwide we’re witnessing waves of weird weather, and psychic symptoms of surreal subjective superstition and seriousness as the subconscious surfaces to be seen, or something of that sort.

Which in part is why this possible post is taking a roundabout ramble of a route again to get to the point. Since the background story is too inwardly convoluted to elaborate without making it seem more so.

Whether it was the weather, Saturn, shock of progressive loss of teeth, and exposure to daunting and indigestible information, or EMF waves through a neighbouring wall, or all those and more, or creativity momentarily not flowing like it did before, i saw that fear is when an imagined self turns imagination against itself.

Whether there really is some dimensional shift occurring, not for want of people speaking of it with or without experience or integrity, and hopefully not some glitch, quirk, or aberration, while noticing some limitation on the relevance of the written word when attempting to describe it.

So, seeking some fresh input or inspiration and a change of colour range to play with, i took a short walk with a camera and meandered into the garden of a stately house to study the flowers in full bloom, knowing the flowering of positive change must begin from within for it to be self-evident without, as they are one and the same.

Pausing on a pebbled path, to gravitate, crouch, and compositionally contemplate closely, bright pink and magenta dahlias, and waiting for a pause from the breeze for focus, as both a bumble and the lens zoom in.

With intent to raise the vibe artistically on the chakra flower colour spectrum of my inner barometer when it comes to something to possibly paint, and after an overextended season or so of greys greens and browns. The medium is the message and the point of the post is in the pictures.

Discovering later, the flower lightly bears the popular name, ‘Happy Pink Wink’. Words which refer to something more than themselves, silently alive within itself, euphoric, peaceful, pure.

Friendly flower faces flutter,

a family of Happy Pink Wink.

Nodding telepathically,

one with the breeze. ~

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

Martin Rainbowmaker

TRIP INTO KERRY

A brief break from blog posts to bogs and fence posts and back again. Back by fluttering flame in the grate, contemplating and waiting for words to filter down and wrapped in a cloud of unknowing.

Really no big deal within diversity and scale of worldly world’s activity everywhere ongoing. Memory traces of tracks and trails over hills, cloud-cloaked mountains sombre and slumbering, stark impressions on reflection at leisure in hindsight.

Ruminating random residue in a timeless continuum of artistic assimilation and needless relevance. Revisiting the essence of the flow and flux of feeling following skeins in the weave in the mode of meditative music.

This oblique poetic preamble a strategy of finding and following a flow and not leaning on limiting lines of literal language. Or, in worldly words, and shifting gears to sound succinct, simply a lift with friends and a longstanding invitation to their neighbouring homes in the mountains. Timely, not before time, and relatively outside time unless memory is a measure.

In the back with car and trailer packed and stacked with books and oriental bric-a-brac between their strenuous full day weekly stints on a market stall and then returning home to relative relaxation.

Down tunnelled lanes of backroad trees in soft drizzle, stopping on the way for week’s supplies at a vastly stocked yet almost deserted huge supermarket, floor-space the size i strangely never saw before and seemingly manned by just one man. Spaciously quiet and somehow surreal in the scheme of things.

Rounding a wide curve of road above a valley in sparse traffic and in big sheep country, the land large with sheep dotted and distant. Low grey cloud above reedy slopes punctuated by sporadic solitary small wind-bent trees, and clustering mostly around scattered farm cottages.

Along a slumber of mountains evening darkening through rain-spotted window glass, till down a winding gated track where the dog is glad to go on ahead, park and enter, sheltered from a passing wave of nightfall rain.

With reference and reverence to rain and there normally being no great lack of it in Kerry, ironically coincident with the duration of my stay, the water pump burned out needing replacement.

Most noticeable if you have to tiptoe to the toilet in the night and the water bucket needs a refill from an outside barrel tricky to reach for in the dark depending on a torch. Minor whimsical contrasts of change from a current combination of cabin fever and convenience duly designed by the universe.

Needing new inspirational material and a round-about ramble on a rough tufted terrain of bracken and bramble, stacked-stone walls and vast vistas vanishing in shrouded cloud cover to infinity and taking three dozen photo shots.

With this random word-sketch an interval of impressions between probable inspirations, a free form foil for a few photos. Knowing i’ll most likely create something totally and typically unrelated.

Fixing a fence with a friend in sporadic shifts and tea breaks and talk of travels in remote cultures. Replacing weathered posts and pounding in where possible around a small garden plot bordered by gnarled and knotted trees, to keep the sheep out. Sheep wire wrenched taut, barb-topped and hammered home with assorted dwindling staples and joking “tension causes a fence.”

In a sensitive space of bare perception the largeness of the land eludes the net of language, as it does the spread and web-work of managed enclosures. Dark mounded mountains dome-topped and looming down sheep-cropped and grass-gripped slopes.

Endlessly weathering and cleaving the clouds, communing like the ebb and flow of tides, and in mutual contrast mutely defying the human need for clusters of sheltered intimacy.

One wonders how it might have looked or was inhabited in the metaphorical realms of extreme antiquity. The Tuatha De Dannan tribes before the Fomorians moved across the land. But this is always now and what is real is relative to the presence of the beholder.

Turbulent times torn between the tamed and the wild, neither yet evolved out of duality and domination to unify one with all within a habitat of wholeness and harmony.  

In the wondering and in the land as one, a longing and a loss eluding language. Actually a projection of currently emerging subliminal patterns of thought, needing present silent attention in the timeless now.

Change is certainly afoot yet which way it may chance to walk is beyond definition of such a measure. While this is just a subjective sketch, a word-painting, improvised and open to any and every interpretation. Just a trip into Kerry. From blog posts to fence posts and back again. ~

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

Martin Rainbowmaker.

CHIVES IN BLOOM

(A painting poem.)

From ancient futures and imaginings of the land bathed in the breath of eternity and a thousand years of peace. Pushing the envelope of big white clouds, pondering how to paint timelessness without producing predictable platitudes.

 

In response the black moon in passing crossing the Chiron point and triggering feeling for healing wounds as within so without, reflecting as reality and right on four degrees of Taurus and my natal sun.

A swirl of temporal turbulence in the continuum with its snares and snags of linear paradoxical duality in comparing the vision with the mundane and falling for the illusory measurer of time as if it were a ruler.

Time being where memory and imagination meet as if in the non-moment of now and not going anywhere, just changing form. While chanting a silent inner mantra of ‘mother earth help me raise my energy to align with your rising vibrations.’ Thirteen being no doubt luckier than we were told to believe.

Freak weather around the globe and nothing on the news but gold rush. Tornadoes and flash floods through all latitudes longitudes and parallels. Watching ‘2016 is strange’ on the computer. Epidemics of articulated juggernaut trucks swallowed up by potholes, cars toppled by torrents swept away along with the ‘mainstream news’, from Europa to Asia and a lurid backdrop of lava flows fuelling forest fires beyond control.

In the infinite vastness of everywhere happening forever without boundaries where all rulers whether clocks or cliques, temporal, technological, or human, are ludicrous and laughable, manifestly unmeasurable as mind is one with the multiverse.

Purple lupins, foxgloves, lilacs in the garden nod and bloom. A gentle rain passing softly sprinkles flourishing beds out the back and a green renaissance resonates in harmony with chives in full bloom.

Which in pottering becomes the focus of a shot, and the same sweet clean lilac colour of chives and green becomes the theme. Commonplace and seemingly composed like Vincent might have seen and painted in a healing dream.

With all complexity pared down to a soft pencil point then abandoning altogether the niggles of measure for a bold bristle brush as if prompted by Van Gogh and lightly brushed at leisure.

First take took just a day, just the bare essentials, though will it stay that way? At least it has potential. Something was still missing, the essence needs enhancing.

The highlights on the blooms and other small corrections, intensify the focus but not labour to perfection.

A timely right brain therapy with minimal modifications. Just a weave of leaves and blooms, a sense of integration. A shift from taking the world to heart, through art as meditation.

Healing of wounds from the inside out, seems to be what this is about. Whatever one thinks about just grows, manifests as the world in front of your nose.

So i take a break from having to rhyme, as even that keeps you stuck in time. A change must have happened as none too soon, three kindred friends gathered in my room, a healing connection and chives in bloom. *

**** **** ****

Martin Rainbowmaker.

BIG WHITE CLOUD

  (A freeform flow.)

Positive change is afoot and a huge wave just washed through, a shifting of clouds. Winged Mercury released from stagnating retrograde like a slingshot reverberating in the aethers. An arrow tipped with the seed of radical revision born of deep introspection. Volcanic eruptions spew molten magma and the phoenix rising.

 

Consulting the oracle hopeful of a sea change, a turning of the hitherto corrupted tide. People everywhere aware despite the still slumbering mass and the media on a leash, cracks creaking in the structure. As within so without in the season of seeds sprouting breaking through the surface to the sun.

Abundance, that which there just has to be more of, happening by itself when even the sins are all just pathetically synthetic.

Earth in a timeless abundance otherwise organically transmuting anomalous intrusions, disseminating seeds of novelty through Fauna, Flora, and The Wisdom Web-work of Novel Solutions.

All the winged, webbed, legged, finned, and furry, one with the way of things. Beyond the two-leggeds’ dependence on four wheels, synthetic substitutes for natural faculties, stealing and selling sacred soil and seizing the source, coating the earth with concrete to feel more comfortably at home.

Or, creating abundance by leaving it alone except when it asks for a hand, which in no way merits a robotic army of mechanical grabbing machines minus respect.

Forgetting, humans need a similar setting to thrive as do flowers. Imagine even lightly blowing the rainbow bloom on a bubble and not expecting the whole to rearrange.

Best not to mess with a living planet. She who fruitfully feeds for free, as we, scattered like windblown seeds in the grass, one with elements and subject to sun, to get to the point and not ramble on but inserted more paragraphs so there’d be more spaces.

While waiting for weather and sun for an uplift in vibration so instead had to create one using imagination. That done, haul up anchor from any tangled fronds of introspection that may be mired and remedy with healing herbal resolve and affirmation.

Was prompted and timely so, i hadn’t taken any photos for quite a while. Immersed in liberating limitations of imagery and inspiration. So took the point and made a point of getting to the point for want of somewhere else to go. The point being a jutting headland five minutes’ walk away overlooking the bay.

Without walking far, hoping to catch a catalyst or a creative clue conceptually camouflaged in consensus commonplace consciousness. Just a walkabout, a random interlude between probable improvisations.

A chill wind and whitecaps whipping the bay, wind-bent whitethorn leaning away, grazing sheep on green slopes. With an eye for composition avoiding the literal obvious what can you do with that but simplify?

Between eyesight and sunlight on a dark digital screen, a zoom with a robotic mind of its own back and forth like a yo-yo with no brakes to stabilize other than reverse, why do they make them like that ? Though clicked twenty-five shots, boldly click where no intuition has gone before and when it feels like there’s some magic in there.

Simply green fields, profoundly blue sky, and a slow but bright white bank of hugely voluminous cumulus, a towering wonder in and of itself. Epitome of uplift invoked and manifest in the shared mind of Gaia Sophia the Earth.

A catalyst for simple composition where substance takes precedence over complexity which is probably what drew me to the point. In the beginning there was the point and the point was paint. Significance is in the substance itself and that’s about the essence of it. ~

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

Martin Rainbowmaker.

ANCIENT FUTURE

You may say it’s just a dream.

               It’s a vision i have seen,

of a world that’s new and green,

                               in the golden days.~

                                                               (A song.)

 

I’m still getting a perspective on this recent painting, Ancient Future, and the process through which it came to be.

At a casual glance it may seem light-weight and not without imperfections but as an artistic therapeutic uplift from an unbidden introspective like the need of a seed emerging from inner depths to be birthed into the light.

Even these words are a second rewrite, as the visual image urge relates to impressions so ephemeral and elusive not subject to the rules of grammar. A subterranean understatement. Probably an impulse from the earth herself.

File under the current state of humanity as one with the planet without further elaboration. Combined with the ascending awareness of previously dormant potential accessible to human imagination. Then found a video talk on the internet by Lucia Rene, titled (Ascension game changer.) With regard to being in resonance with the world’s resonance rising. Bound to be uplifting.

Creative blocks are not much fun especially if you’re not a plumber. The flow to go with was nowhere apparent but for an ancient mound in mind and vast distant vistas vibrating in waves to infinity like a far off promised land.

Key elements from a previous painting traced and placed relative to proportion and perspective without a clue or cue what the rest might do. Till a few fields miraculously modified and metamorphed and with the help of an eraser settled into the rounding curve of the land.

Visualizing spatial dimensions of air and land in proportional progressions of atmospherics of colour tone and contour. Then the ‘ring barrow’ with the mound in the middle suggested itself. Making sure the ellipse was on a lateral plane congruent with respect to perspective.

Recalling a recent morning barely on the brink of waking, as if a hypnogogic hand briefly pointed or drew the subsequent identical ellipse at that spot, and surfaced again, just when the land needed a central circle symbol focus.

Five days and nights coaxing something from nothing in particular with a method. Minutely modifying and modulating till land and sky expanded out credibly and consistently from underfoot to horizon line.

Vast grassy plains into the infinite. Down to a thin sliver of faraway forest and mysterious distant ranging hills long low and receding into pale atmospheric blue.

It’s all in the imagining, what kind of world would such an image be emanating from, what goes on there? Intuition says it’s a world where all boundaries and divisions are blended and blessed in diversity and a sublime timelessness pervades the biospheric continuum.

No past relics of metal, plastic, and concrete and all parasitic plunder ameliorated, harmonious habitations with no scars of speeding cars or geomantic aberrations but markers and signs of reverence for the land, and what’s more we’ve done it before.

The ancients way ahead of us in the imagined future where spirit entails fewer props, crutches, gadgets, institutions, regulations, but with unreserved resolutions to pollutions. Dispute resolved in community fairness and no hierarchy, punishing for profit. Mutual amends made without amendments.

Perhaps an ancient future wave is washing through this place, redefining it to a state of being, uplifting all an octave to a plateau above mundane. Integrated nurture without boundaries, food freely grown locally everywhere as you do and it does naturally everywhere there’s no shortage of soil.

Ancient Future, no sooner complete than sent out as a signal over the synthetic lighthouse like a phoenix from the ashes and the earth in abundance.

Kindness being a better bonding than money or gold, in sharing, ancient future thereby becomes a present, other than which nothing is. ~

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

Martin Rainbowmaker.