Nominate Blog Awards Ireland 2015

  

Martinrainbowmaker.blogspot.ie 
is a two person co-operative project based in West Cork and Kerry respectively.

The blog is updated with new posts each month continuously since January 2012.

The material consists of an informal presentation of my artwork and painting in progress, photography, writing, and music.  With the help of my friend in Kerry and his computer skills, and aesthetic appreciation of layout and colour especially, which is a main feature of the blog.  The text is colour coded in harmony with the content.

The purpose is to share the process of artistic creation as it happens, and to make it accessible to anyone who may need guidance or encouragement.  To inspire and to share intimately the nature of inspiration, and the importance of imaginative vision as being a natural aspect of daily life.

The style and subject matter of the written articles come from the same source as the artwork, therefore not separate.  All-inclusive wholeness being the nature of a creatively focussed life, expressed personally and playfully, coming from a whole lifetime in art.

Since there are no separate subjects and all is interconnected, inspiration to create can come from any area of life, depending on the current mode of focus, the seasons, or whatever i happen to be thinking about.  The blogposts follow the changes in the cycle of seasons, like a nature journal.

The intent is something other than art as crafted commercial objects.  Educational in that i wish to stimulate and encourage people to evolve imaginatively, true to their own vision of a more harmonious world.

So the work as a whole encompasses insights of spiritual experience, in its broadest, non-denominational sense.  Specifically to nurture a sense of wonder, a refined sensitivity to the beauty of nature and beyond the limitations of popular sentiment.

Also in that sense therapeutic, to celebrate the actual poetic experience of nature in all its smallest details, and deconstruct the consensus notion that anything is commonplace or ordinary.

Basically to affirm creativity as being a benevolent and healing force.  As well as an essential faculty for continuity of re-enchantment, reawakening the magic of innocent experience we may remember from childhood.

A simple sense of wonder and curiosity as an antidote to all forms of indoctrination to the contrary.  To counter the influence of a world in turbulent transition, filled with fearful stories presented as news.

Giving back to society all that has served and guided me well, in service to others.  By always nurturing and doing what i love most and learning to discern what exactly it consists of.  Nurturing and evolving it, not letting what comes naturally go to waste.  Thereby maturing to a vision of positive affirmation which wishes to share itself.  While learning and refining in the process of doing so.

Also learning about language, and how to communicate in ways that will be received on many levels.  It is about communication.  Consequently i am more comfortable writing in a spontaneously invented poetic prose.  Though meticulously edited and revised, it brings colour and vivid images back into language.  It has been said that i write like a painter, which is true, evoking images and feeling.

Typically, i never know what i may create next, hopefully something new, but if it brings enchantment, then i'm happy to have a channel by which to contribute to the larger re-enchantment.  There's a labour of love in the archives.

Martin Law.  West Cork. July 2015. ~
 ~~~~  ~~~~  ~~~~
 

  

SHOT IN THE BARK

On Monday, June 1, 2015, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

I took thirty shots of bark for a background, or is it a barkground? The bark of trees is as diverse as the bark of dogs, but much easier on the ears.

I find myself with a surplus of (not to be wasted) very visually interesting images of varieties of local bark. For seven days and nights since then (which felt like three weeks), wondering in earnest what could be said by way of relevance in presenting them that would be more than just superfluous words.

“What do you say about bark? Speak now!” The question takes on the force of a Zen koan, (a spiritual test question unanswerable on its own terms) where rational contrivance is not acceptable as an authentic answer. It has to be demonstrated, and without even a hair’s breadth of hesitation.

Well, we all know what a dog would say when asked about bark. Never failing to hit the mark, spontaneously instantaneous, authentic, unequivocal, succinct, with nothing one could add. You ask about bark, i show you. “Bark!”

In the same spirit, the images speak for themselves. They are the answer. I show you. Yet, humans are a little different, dualistically speaking. We intellectualize, compulsively.

We talk about, which is to say, around, and dive straight into a tangle of related concepts, constructs, ideas, opinions, other than the immediate unmediated reality in question. You ask about bark? I give you bark.

Furthermore i give you what is not bark, or Zen for that matter. Being nothing but a string of images and clashing symbols, the sort that make a lot of noise but mostly in your head, while thinking it’s called thinking.

I suppose relatively few people ever think about bark anyway. Except those who love and respect the life of trees.

Their intrinsic beauty as much as their multi-faceted usefulness, which is one and the same.

Other than just chopping, burning, clearing, and constructing, with more regard for quantity than quality and nature. When even the cork of the wine bottle you just popped comes from bark.

People who call themselves civilized have an outstanding talent for deforestation which they call progress. Depending on which way you’re heading when you can’t see the wood for the trees.

The way generally being, that which the wood is in the way of. When questioned about 

 ‘where is your habit at’,

 the excuse is,  

“i’m trying to cut them down.”

By stark contrast, take a shame faced look, or a leaf out of the book, (book, a word originating from the Germanic term for beech, and birch.) A look at the wisdom of the peoples we are pleased to call un-civilized.

A good example being the Indians of Turtle Island, (WE-dah pah-T’KAH-sha-nah), which we were told to call america.

The eek-CHAY-we-CHOSH-tah don’t like to be called native americans, understandably. Being,’ The People’ (with the added language equivalent of which people.) For example: Arapahoe (Mahpiyato), the Blue Sky People. Or Chippewa, (HaHAtonwon), the People from the Waterfalls.

First nations people anyway, originally 555 distinct yet interrelated nations. That is, until the second, third, and fourth etc. people barged in, ironically talking of 666. Easy to comprehend not wishing to be called ‘native americans’, and with a shrug, temporarily settling for Indians, and who in their right heart would dare or deign to blame them?

So, continuing to bark up the right tree: The Indians in California used pitch of the

PINYON PINE for, skin problems, digestive problems, colds, flu, tuberculosis, venereal disease, sore muscles, rheumatism, fevers, parasites, sunburn, bark as ingredient in emergency foods, tea, burns, earache, dyes, glue (for arrows etc.), waterproofing, nuts for cakes, puddings, butter, beetle-proofing, looms, saddle parts, cradles, tools, toys.

JUNIPER, for: Kidney problems, heart troubles, haemorrhages, stomach-aches, head-aches, menstrual and other cramps, colds, fevers, smallpox, flu, pneumonia, venereal, diabetes, cholera, tuberculosis, chickenpox, worms, swellings, burns, sore throats, hives, sores, horse-ticks, torch for tinder, smoke bath to calm children, protection from witches or bears.

ASPEN, to prevent premature birth, bark as sweet treat for children, purification, whistles, stings, abscesses, urinary problems, canoes, cups, cords, deodorant, antiperspirant.

FIR and PINE, to heal cuts, boils, bones, throats, colds, kidneys, fevers, and for gum, sugar, bows, poles, beds, floors, fish-hooks, flavouring, nets, sealing water jugs, antiseptic, anti-bleeding. In fact, food, shelter, clothing, tools, medicine, the list is endless, and that’s only four trees.

So i’ll stop yapping, but if you think my bark is worse than my bite, i can assure you, with my dental situation, the reverse

is true. ‘WOOF-WOOF’! <

>>> + <<< >>> + <<<

~ Martin Rainbowmaker ~ 



 

A RAINBOW REALM

On Saturday, May 16, 2015, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

Planet’s presently plopping like a pan of porridge at its peak, and who in the right hemisphere of their brain would blame her?

Forty volcanoes around the globe erupting in unison, thirty-four of them around the Pacific (a word meaning ‘peaceful’) Rim. Not called ‘the ring of fire’ for nothing.

With the Hawaiian Islands dotted in the centre, Kilauea Peak exploding forth in fire, molten lava lake levels loom larger, licking and lapping the crater’s rim.

Leaden lava flows forge through fertile forest, mowing down tall scorched conifers, turning charred timber to solidified hot grey cinder cement, undersea eruptions offshore Oregon.

Whole islands rise from the deep, some submerge. Intercontinental shakes and quakes, a tinkering and tampering with postulated particles, headlong and heedless of lessons of Atlantis.

To puncture the living fabric at vast expense, devoid of concern, even of sanity and sacred common sense or a time window wide enough for wisdom.

Hole-ism fanatic and extreme, pushing beyond limits, diabolical, deceitful, desperate as a trapped rat and, ‘only seeking but a minutest postulated particle of god.’ Really?! By looking through the wrong end of a telescope?

Being of course, in stark cold contrast, merely the tip of a metaphorical iceberg, and a cool sobering stern-face reminder to ‘chill out’. Enquire within. Just be humbly thankful for what is.

Just as Hawai’i could well be the tip of Lemuria rising, and who do you think will try to lay claim to that? A tectonic proverbial plate we will have to step up to. Relinquishing being a fan of oil-fed flames and all forms of explosion forever.

Thereby too the ‘natural or manmade disaster dichotomy’ and even the doctrinal primordial ‘big bang’ mantra. We do not consent to explosions.

Retrospectively, receptive of echoes out of the blue silence of May, almost a year ago to the day. Solitary experimental photo-shoot meditation, creative spring- time celebration invocation, A GLOBAL SPRING, (see archives, May 2014.)

Receiving seasonal echoes out of the blue as promptings. Equipped only with aspiration to evolutionary potential of intuitive aesthetic refinement and a blank slate. To dive deeper into those rainbow energy fields, so did just that.

Worship of explosions being the old model we will have to let go of as unresolved childhood trauma temper tantrums posing as power. All they left us with is a lot of holes, in the ground, in communities of families, individual lives and souls.

Whoreship itself, being a dualistic subservience promoting hierarchy, obviously, if you stand-under. Masochistic self-putdown, false humility.

Alternatively, energy fields is a better metaphor. They are demonstrably omnipresent and experiential. That way, you are not an anomaly among anomalies standing out in the field. Devoid of self-worth, doomed to disintegrate in a never present future.

Not a thing among things, separated by nothingness, which is just non-sense. As if something and nothing could exist independently. When you return to your senses that’s self-evident anyway.

This way, we don’t end up with a load of holes, or even obsession with controls, as when all is seen as separate and therefore other. As energy fields, we don’t end up.

Being already one-with the whole. If you were not, you wouldn’t last more than a few seconds, neither would anything ‘else.’

Energy fields can be and are photographed by the way. In particular by a very unassuming man called Harry Oldfield. You’ll find him easily on the internet.

While, i’m focussed on the aesthetics of everything, by natural preference. The rainbow spectrum an iconic overarching palette pertaining to and reigning over lush living diversity within the visible field of light.

Even though a finer frequency than interacts within the optical eye pervades and bathes everything and we are one with all as that.

The spectrum as a whole is most likely infinite beyond present perception. I like to express with what’s at hand. Imagine being bathed within these flowing fields and folds of benevolent colour frequencies of feeling as being our birth right in these realms. Rainbow fields forever. ~

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

Martin Rainbowmaker

A LOVE OF LEAVES

On Saturday, April 25, 2015, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

If you don’t love leaves, then love, leaves.

~ ~ ~

What i mean to say is, without leaves we are lost. Absent without leaves. Leaves love life, and feed us through the sun, lavishing in abundance gifts of food and oxygen.

Lacking love of leaves we languish, backs turned on a convenient backdrop of out of focus foliage, forgetful of photosynthesis. Focus on a photo shoot, to frame faces full of faked frivolity. Forgetting, fruits, flowers, and faces are also absent without leaves.

Freeze frame photographic physiognomy apart, anyone may well wonder as to what exact unequivocal elucidation such obliquely slantwise allusive alliteration may be leaning or leading towards, being, as it is, apparently so literally elusive to legible literacy.

Ah, there’s the rub, with or without an eraser and despite irrevocable rewrite. Never mind what webs we weave, following a tenuous thread out on a limb, and just about to spit out subtle insight on the tip of the tongue when the bubble pops, blown away, irretrievable as a dandelion clock, as often is the way, with what would have been a worthwhile word to say. 

 

Save to say, beyond service to self, it serves well to ‘spell out’ the societal significance stemming from a love of leaves. Put plainly, the paradigm pertains to peoples’ priorities.

Are you bored yet? Or just skipping over stepping stones unmindful of the depth that forever flows in midstream? In abandoning shady banks, investing in the natural world order is a better bet for sure.

Thankfully, ‘money doesn’t grow on trees,’ or the world would be even more of a mayhem of mad axe men. However here’s a hint, ‘look after the leaves and the fruits will follow by themselves.’ To tell the truth it’s much bigger than that. The nature of abundance has a tendency to be huge, wanting only in interest and collective imagination.

True progress will be when we remember how to feed ourselves, free of regulators and middle-men, the politics of the poison pen, and but for them the earth would return to her natural bounty, stemming from our love of leaves, superseding and supplanting our need for greed, growing green without envy.

To imagine, is to make magic manifest. Growing from its fertile soil, imagination without limitation, and food grows by itself without technology. Dream large and in abundance naturally. A viable human future will be, not power plants and technology, but plant powers gently tended and free. Therefore without illusion of ownership, limitation, coercion, not to mention industry.

It’s easy to imagine what we wish to see, to cultivate what comes and grows naturally. A wild garden world without artifice of intrusive technology, earthfelt imagination flowing free, a haven on earth where it’s meant to be.

Meanwhile, inwardly forming these and similar paragraphs in mind, i go into the garden. Respectfully selecting a few cabbage leaves, illumined green-gold by evening sun, and leisurely take a string of photos of them too.

On checking back to see the latest shot, the camera freezes, jammed and refusing to function, recharge, or even switch off. The third one to need replacement in the same number of years or less.

Well, if such is the power of thought and mind to so interact electrically, with inorganic technology, and who can say it could not be? Then imagine what powers of manifestation are collectively held in every nation. Despite the drive to mind control with thorny briars to bind the soul, all cease to grip when we are whole.

Though we’re not likely to forget, where you focus is what you get. ~

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

Martin Rainbowmaker.

BLACK FEATHERS

On Tuesday, April 14, 2015, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

Emerging from round earth’s brown cyclic season in increment. Bold black rooks poke and peck a pittance of peanuts on grass seeded peaty paths. Regal omen raiders, stark sleek settlers in casual swoop and grip, glinting unruffled rags of iridescent violet blue black feathers.

Phasing into growing green at a grass pace, and bud shoots reaching where a patch of sunlight touches. Willow pollen drifts down soft in a daisy haze and powder blue spaces.

Rows of rooks on rooftops, riders rising on the ridge, range around. They hop, warmed from brick stacks and pots and scatter, forewarned by the slightest human movement.

In an earthbound brown frame fading, morphing from wintry webs of memory and mist. Charting colour-coded solar cycles, synchronizing solstices and seasons on catalytic cusps of creation, waiting on the tilled, planted, and still warming earth.

Kaleidoscopic tilts and turns through tinted glazed glass fractal forms a complex mirrored mix enriched. Redeeming green streaming through the gleaming gold.

Turning to trace a pencil point and patterned web of lines to mark and make an exact map mindful of a manifested moment. Being some ancient and long surviving uniquely human ritualistic process of re-cognition.

Just as the body assimilates food and rooks peck nuts, the soul digests experience, producing art in the process. A shared form of spirit energy, language beyond limitation of language.

Unique beyond duplication, other than visual imitation in conception, no mere mimicry. Co-dependence countered and transformed by co-creation. Celebration of unity consciousness, indivisible, one with the process of creation.

This brown icon presently in progress no mere eye-con, a starkly monochromatic marker for the departing of winter, shadows cast show the light rising.

There is traditionally a rich and diverse symbolism attached to the archetype of these familiar yet highly intelligent birds. Beyond popular superstition and prejudice and into indigenous understandings, the stark predominant fact of their blackness is not to be taken as negative.

I was previously already seeking a subject that would resonate with the living Celtic tradition, along with an ‘inkling’ (a small black bird?) to play around with textures, the silky smooth plumage, and the rough and grainy ground. Texture is an important element, along with contour, light and shade, and colour.

I also wanted something simple. Is anything ever simple? Simple is up to us to be. There’s always more to everything than meets most eyes, and paradoxically, that’s also part of my motivation.

So then, these, and more, plumed creatures swooped down in a samurai-like instinctive flurry of black feathers. I like the sound of ‘black feathers’, at least the title is simple, visually evocative, and has thirteen letters. ~ 
 

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

Martin Rainbowmaker.

A RITE OF SPRING

On Friday, March 27, 2015, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

Inspiration is a bit like fishing. Though i’ve never caught a fish, haven’t tried, preferring to leave them in the water where they’re in their element.

 

Although, as with fishing, you can’t grasp inspiration head on, you have to wait. It’s a receptive non-pursuit like meditation, waiting without waiting, just be fully present, what else can you do?

Any other way is artificial and only results in artifice (arty fish), and the art of art is the avoidance of mere artifice. You can of course be present but not fully aware, but even so, your unawareness is fully in the present, where else could it possibly be?

Tangentially, though indirectly integral to the present narrative, when i put peanuts out for the small birds, the ever watchful rooks usually swoop in and dominate the situation and i’ve tended to deter them to give the small birds a fair chance.

So for a change, thinking to get a few close up photos of their impressive blue-black bold-beaked presence i put the bait out on the path especially for them.

They did arrive, but very tactically, and knew exactly what i was at, despite me being indoors. Timing their swoop, retreat, and apparent absence perfectly. Instinctively millennially wise to the ways of humans and our predictable tricks.

Though they may well have provided me with a preferred alternative game to fishing, as well as a potential new source of artistic inspiration. These birds are so aware and one-with their surroundings that they must have eyes and ears in every part of their being.

The preceding few paragraphs plus the photos are a unified experience, succinct and complete as a momentary happening. While, in the hours since, engaged in social activities, namely market day, i’m still left wondering and wordless as if still fishing for its artistic significance.

It’s not as if the process goes ahead all at once like some caricature of what we may imagine the process of making art to be like. Actually it’s quite the opposite. Typically, before i can do something new, the path i thought i was on runs out, as if into a thicket. Going nowhere, now-here, and happens without fail, except fail is what it feels like.

This could be quite daunting and usually is, for a while, but for the fact of it always having been so. There’s quite obviously a principle at work here.

Though with hindsight, undiminished trust in unknowing and a guiding aspiration, contemplation, preparation and application, well, who knows? It’s all an experiment anyway, and only as serious as we choose to think it is. To anybody else it doesn’t matter at all.

So i’m always somewhat relieved when i come round to embracing the fact that i haven’t a clue, all i can draw is a blank. Just another blank in a long series of blanks, all the way back to before the dawn of relative maturity, and until this eternal now, couldn’t even envisage sitting down to put words to it. How do you describe a blank?

Yet, there’s the way through the wood! How can you find a new way if you don’t lose the old one? The snake sheds its skin, the phoenix rises from the ashes, spring springs eternal, and the crusty crystalized caterpillar emerges as a beautiful butterfly.

So, i do have a clue, i was moved by something. “So now”, says the higher self (not as if that’s somebody else), “what exactly is it that’s so moving about it?” That’s where you start to focus in on actual perceptual impressions which otherwise may have been gone in a flash, a blank without trace.

Though the way those big blue-black bold-beaked birds so majestically took off on an instinctive instant, they clearly own the unalienable right of spring. ~

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

Martin Rainbowmaker

EXTRA ORDINARY.

On Monday, March 16, 2015, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

I’ve been looking for what’s called ‘ordinary things’, but so far haven’t found anything that qualifies. ~

Meanwhile, while waiting, wondering, wistfully watchful and wishful, to witness from the window, winter weather on the wane. Well aware white witches and wizards of the world are wide awake to the wild wicked wily ways of the wilful worldly warmongers. Having winnowed a wealth of wheat from weeds on the world-wide-web.

Thus said, and delivered with more than enough www’s to trouble you if not double-you up. Waiting patiently, impatient for lower back pain to ease and warm spring sun to soften the density of composted soil and the cyclic return of light and lightness on all levels.

Feeding the fire in the grate indoors, in contemplation of heat, heart, hearth, earth, and the perennial intricate conundrums of the process of art.

Mad macrocosms, oppositions, conjunctions, Plutonic, Uranian, and rabid red dogs of war. Bursting forth from the retreating age of Kali, bathed in photonic light, as above so below. Literal last battles in all dimensions falsified, covered over, not covered by the cowardly cowering television matrix of distraction, and all the world’s at that stage and all the people pawns.

Pause to poke the bright glow in the grate, shift the vision, coal crackles, brittle logs issue sporadic sparks and gunshot cracks as yellow flames flare. My focus is on inspiration here.

The world is on fire, everything presented in a blaze of drama, flares up as if larger than life itself. Even artists aspire to do something big, something extraordinary.

Notice the predictable human urge to overreach, as if the ground that supports you was unworthy of gratitude. It’s natural to aspire, but only half the story. The outward requires the inward in order to be whole.

In being forever outrageously outward we can lose touch with ‘the ordinary’, (so called), that which all life consists of. Without affection and appreciation of what we call ‘the ordinary’, how can we hope to encounter any extra-ordinary? No wonder the urge for power and control. No natural affection for all that simply is, we become ungrounded in being.

Otherwise it’s like wanting to build a big house, but not liking bricks. Wanting to become enlightened in contrast to what you think you are. When ‘enlightenment’, (so called), is as you are now, having failed to become something you’re not, in a future that doesn’t exist.

I even put a search into the internet, looking into hundreds of examples of ‘paintings of ordinary things.’ Mostly pretty boring, as we’ve programmed our machines to equate ordinary with boring, commonplace with uninteresting. Because that’s the way we are programmed to think.

You know, “familiarity breeds contempt”, is the presumptive mantra. Whereas, in nature, any ordinary thing is extraordinary, largely because it wasn’t made but grew that way by itself, naturally.

The practice of art (any art) is to see through and beyond the word ’ordinary’ into the mysterious beauty of the natural. When what we make reflects that, it can be quite extraordinary. Then we are no longer at war with the natural world, presuming it to be other than our true being.

It’s natural and inevitable that we wish to be of a world that mirrors our finest essence. We grow to embody our relationship to our perceived surroundings, for better or worse.

All the more reason to be affectionately and ever more creatively intimate and curious with the simplest of so called things. All life thrives on appreciation. ~

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

Martin Rainbowmaker

RAIN ON THE PATH.

On Sunday, February 15, 2015, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

Slicing the mound and the moat into two semi-circles with a spade. Bamboo canes on the ground, weighted with rocks, determine where to cut, the previously celebrated circle, of water, clay, grass, and central standing stone.

Enough energy gone into concentric circles to open a worm hole or a portal or two. The crops in radial rows, while they tend not to move around much, do need more space to rotate. So it wasn’t long before i was digging more than just an idea.

A few days without rain, so, rough-dug the clods and sods of turf, turning into two half-moons with a central straight path, and padding down the corner curves of clay with grasp and pound of rounded rock.

So now, since rain fell overnight, i survey a choppy sea of sodden clay clods, with slippery path treacherous to tiptoe. So let it settle itself, till wind and sun come to dry clods to crusted turf tufts, to turn and desiccate with blade of spade.

Being but a momentary marker, a mundane interlude of transformational transition, extending the path through circles and seasons with no loss of symbolism or soil. No mere trivial thing, setting the stage for spring, and the awakening song, a stone’s clack against a stainless spade.

Warmed by fire in Hibernian hibernation, contemplating cultivation, and the instinctual alchemical forge to ground fertility. Returning to turn topsoil and chop, changing the composition with loving loads of porous peat, enlivening and lightening to loam. While bright flames flutter in the grate indoors, and evening rain intermittently spills and splatters, dripping from clogged guttering.

As above, so below, rain, a macro-micro microbial reshuffle, symptomatic blessing of larger transition. Nothing mundane about sacred soil so taken for granted, the tilth to till and tend from which nutrition springs anew.

Just a grounding interlude ingredient for the blog’s pot, devoid of drama, explosive revelations, the throes of empires crumbling to dust, structures buckled and blasted go belly up, opening all the buried cans of worms, while ‘apocalypse’ simply means revealing.

Turning the cyclic seasonal page, as Pisces morphs to Aquarian age. As quakes unblock some ancient springs, so to return to simpler things. All this, just a playful afterthought, for want of anything more ground-breaking and close to home to report. ~

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

Martin Rainbowmaker.