ROSE SPELT EROS.

 

"A ROSE is a ROSE is a ROSE", is EROS.  Aroma of amor, perfume so refined, to never be defined, to breathe it is divine.

In Tao essence a ROSE is not "a ROSE", or any other name, can ever quite contain, the sweetness still remains.

Mindful if you grasp, the bloom becomes a rasp. The petals you adore, but if you grasp for more, the ROSE becomes a SORE.

Painting:  'ROSE SPELT EROS'.  Aug. 2013.

A ROSE is not a ROSE, is something no one knows.  Can never be defined, especially with a mind, aroma so refined, essence of divine. ~

 ~~~~   ~~~~  ~~~

 Martin Rainbowmaker.

YES THERE'S MORE.

 

Recent reports of rampage of rage and outrage over ruinous rumours regarding right and wrong.  Resulting in wrecked rhythms and outright robbery rudely intruding on recognized rights and regular routines.

Cruelly curtailing and cancelling cohesion in chaos of collective cognitive dissonance.  Even rainbows were misappropriated and the spectrum disrespected and forcibly fashioned into a fanatically false fetish.  Diversity deliberately demonized but demonstrably diabolically deified as a dichotomy deceptively deployed as divisive delusion and deviously delivered as a veritable virtuous vortex.

Long lapse since previous post but yes there's more.  Many may well have wondered if I'd evaporated or just dried up.  Though the previous post was so adequate as an introduction that I was hesitant to follow up with anything that might be less so.  Along with an inspiration numbing retreat from ongoing intentional world-size dramas of deliberate disappointment and demoralization by design.

Though now, perusing this painting prompted this piece of prose as a possible post.  My attention as well as my footsteps were recently drawn to a painting I made more than twenty years ago and which was bought around that time by Christine who runs the local craft shop.   

                                               

                                                       

 I hadn't visited the shop in years until last week when I called by to enquire if she still had handmade shoes for sale.  She did and I bought a pair, pleased to have footwear with durable soles and heels for a change.  Unprompted by me Christine happened to comment, "the painting still hangs in a prominant place."  I thanked her for that.  I was also pleased to find later that I still have a photo of it.

                        

  The painting:  COSMIC DAISIES.~ 2003.

As to why I would feel prompted to share this particular painting, it has little to do with conventional reasons or resemblance to reality in a literal sense.  It's more because it embodies a quality of positive sensitivity which there are no actual words for even if I go to some lengths to say so.  It's a complete antidote to all that is evoked in the two opening paragraphs.  A healing essence and peaceful vibration.  A counterbalance to all forms of worldly harshness and prevalent intentional uglification. 

Bright sunbursts of feathered petals pervaded by a timeless eternal dimension of soft clear light.  Mellow micro macro mode of fine-tuned tones and flavour, a sunny warmth and delicate detail in light and shifting shadows.  The immanence of innocence epitomized as starlike icons against a deep dark of earth, or perhaps a void with pinpoint stars.  Unanimous in harmonious cohesion silently singing together as one family of flower beings.

After every edge or boundary, inseparably a correlative oceanic space expands allowing inevitable diverse multiplicities of more form/space to proliferate to infinity and ever beyond and you can count on that, at least for a little while.  The finite is merely a micro-measure of infinity, which by definition is beyond all definition and we are one with that, just as distinctness demonstrates underlying mutual inseparability.  Finite proves infinity as one and the same.  Anything inseparable is the same thing/no thing.  Form and space are one. *

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

                           Martin Rainbowmaker

(P.S. Please do continue to scroll down.  There's another 282 illustrated articles here, plus more.

Appreciative comments are welccome and appreciated.)

 

JUST A REMINDER.

 

 Poignantly apparent perhaps, a previous and present pause in the perennial process of painting, posting, piano playing, and poetic prose production.  Partly predictable and not without past precedent.

 

One may well wonder why.  While with one's awareness as witness to wild unwinding within the world of wily, wilful, warlike ways; where otherwise the way would be to welcome, to wish and wonder.  Wonder when we the world will welcome wellness and wake and walk as one.

 

  

 Tales of the Sea.  2012

Having said that, which speaks for itself, as well of course for whoever happens to be reading it, this is just a reminder.  A reminder that there are a lot of writings and paintings embedded within this blog which I wish for people to explore freely.  While I have no way of knowing if a visitor to this site does so or to what extent.

 

Presence of Oak.  2015

To paraphrase the two opening paragraphs for anyone unable to comprehend alliterated language:  There's still a lull in my creative motivation or at least inspiration since people everywhere have been induced to lose the plot, so no wonder if inspiration is affected.  "It's easier to fool people than to convince them they've been fooled."  That's outrageously self-evident.

 

  

Apache Mystery.  No.2. 2012. (Detail)

I mean, how do you share the love and beauty of nature when people have been tricked into fearing every aspect of their surroundings?  In this case that which is invisible and therefore all too easy to assume it to be anywhere and everywhere simply because it's said to be just that: invisible.

 

 

Rainbow Planet.  2017.

This is just an invitation to look deeper into what's presented here.  This is just eight years of paintings, diverse writings, as well as music.  You can either continue scrolling down and click 'older posts', or pick any year and month in the 'archives.'  It goes all the way back to how this blog originated, from random free-form emails and gradually took on a more carefully contemplated form.

 

Black Feathers. 2015.

I'm glad to be adding another post, after recently accidentally deleting both my access to 'Blogger' as well as my email account, both now restored.  Mainly I want to just bring a few previously posted paintings forward into a present post as I feel their intrinsic worth is in simply being seen and calmly contemplated.  Besides, I need to create and share a bit of beauty despite a planet that's plainly lost the plot.

 

Ancient Future. (Detail)  2016.

Also to add that a friend who's name is Cathy has put together a website:  Lazy Ostrich.ie

There you will see 69 of my paintings side by side, in a number of pages without any text to distract.  They can be clicked to enlarge individually.  Though it may not be immediately obvious, any painting is available from her site as a quality print with accurate colour reproduction.  I believe that to be the purpose of the site and that the prints are easily affordable. So, talking of sight do take a look.  Honouring the spirit of beauty, as well as love, peace, freedom, truth, abundance and all other imminently endangered species. ~

 

   ~~~~  ~~~~  ~~~~   

Martin Rainbowmaker

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

ON OTHER WORLDS.

In an infinite universe (what other sort is there?) the likelihood of unimaginable and diversely inhabited worlds without end is of course undeniable.  In an infinite universe probabilities are infinite.

In infinity there is no beginning, no ending, no boundary, no time but eternal now, and no limitation on what may be, and so already is.  In an infinite universe everything imaginable and infinitely more exists everywhere.

So why call it infinite?  In the micro-macro view how could it be otherwise?  Finite is only a measured portion of the infinite with a name.  Whatever we give a name to, we thereby define as a finite thing as being distinct from its surroundings by having an edge.  The name conventionally only applies within this boundary, while in actuality any so-called 'thing' only exists by virtue of what surrounds it.

Beyond every edge however is always space for more and we call it absence.  What we don't focus on is that form and space are not two separate realities.  No form without space no space without form, anywhere, ever.  Self-evident of course but universally ignored, we think we find things more useful than absence, but if that were true, most things would be useless.

Try depicting or even imagining form without space or space without form.  One implies the other.  As with any complementaries, what we call their difference is their shared relative distinctness they have in common.  Each implies the other, they are each and both one- another, and so on to infinity in all directions forever, form and space inter-relating, mutating one into the so-called other.

On another level, it's been quite a while since the previous blog post and the previous painting.  Not surprisingly the unprecedented global drama was affecting my inspirational flow and motivation even before it surfaced and I was already questioning the nature of creativity before that, and then a shock to see a world so universally tricked by deception, literally spell-bound by fear into behaving less than human and in conflict with our own most basic best interests.

Relevant to the counterproductive absurdity of so-called lock down, these drawings and many more during that phase came out of a decade  long seemingly unavoidable confinement in a sordid substandard and claustrophobic rented backstreet house without daylight, or window view but for concrete and no surrounding space and an uphill road right on the doorstep with oil tankers, diggers and dump trucks grinding gears by the window for a year and a half, now that was a lock down.

So much for understatement, but despite being trapped in a box of gloom I did do a lot of paintings, illustrated a published book: see on this blog 'Castles of Cork', played Grand Piano publicly, self-taught in the process, in Bantry House a 'Stately Home', every season, every week.  See 'Videos' (especially No.7 of 7) on this blog at right and CD 'Tracing Ten Summers.'

So these drawings and many more evolved from meditative and therapeutic 'doodles', along with multiple page after page of variations on an unknown but spontaneously and meticulously improvised hieroglyphic script of a very self-consistent character and which I still have examples of.  Mary Rodwell of A.C.E.R.N. in Australia has some of it in her book: 'Awakening' and uses some of these drawings in her E.T. related presentations. 

Basically I simply want to share these selected otherworldly drawings as they have a gentle introspective quality of improvisation which would be a shame to remain unseen.  Even though they are in the archive previously here in 2013.  under 'News Soundbite', I wanted to make them accessible again.

They were originally transcribed very slowly and carefully with inner receptive focus, open to exploration of intrinsic imagination of what may be actual insights like remote viewings or glimpses of how it may be in other realms of predominantly prevailing benevolence or even on other worlds.  No need to wait for "disclosure" to be assured that everything imaginable and more, exists somewhere, on other worlds. *

  ****    ****    ****

  Martin Rainbowmaker

 

























 

EVOKING AUTUMN.

So, how did there come to be a new painting titled 'Evoking Autumn', seeming sufficiently satisfactory and successful in and of itself?

It was four months or more since the previous painting, also similarly preceded by a long gestation period apparently devoid of any suitable potential ideas.  While in a larger sense creative potential may be infinite, somewhat paradoxically not just anything will do.

I could improvise abstractly or in a mode where it's possible for 'anything goes' to perhaps resolve into something significant.  There is always an abundance of profoundly sensitive and infinitely diverse abstract art in the world being created continuously and much that i appreciate.


Yet i mostly tend to make images related to what can be easily identified so as to be entered into, having an aptitude for evoking form, spatial distance, and light, and abstract qualities are concentrated in colour, tone, organic patterning and subtle attention to integrated brush-work.

Not knowing what to express can be very challenging, more so than it used to be perhaps.  Especially in the absence of a social role or other significant mode of activity.  When i have something i'm motivated to work on, immersion in the spontaneous use of a brush is a familiar mode i naturally enter into.


It's not a hobby and i've never regarded it as such and so have never had a use for that word.
Likewise i'm not an amateur artist neither am i professional these are just categories i don't relate to as i've simply continued what comes naturally ever since i could hold a pencil or a brush and the category most related with that is probably human.

So inspiration can't be forced or faked and i just have to wait.  Hardly something you can make a nine-to-five out of.  I dismissed a lot of ideas till a particular photo clicked, thankfully as i wasn't sure if anything ever would for reasons too subtle to describe.


There are criteria, admittedly of my own choosing, relating to the intrinsic significance distinguishing a conception from a cliche and determine if it's a suitable structure for feeling and the feeling is in the flavour and the elements of form and colour and the characteristic touch of brush to canvas

So having waited long in not knowing when or even if for the right moment which always turns out to be now.  Going ahead with loose pencil lines mapping out and adapting image to fit.  Minimal crayon touches to indicate colour, darkest areas filled methodically with black paint and diluted linear washes of same to fortify contours.  Using one bold and pointed brush throughout wielded delicately and wand-like in my most meditative element one with the process.


Wanted it to last longer so as to have that activity to focus on which was unfolding very smoothly and contemplatively quiet.  Yet still came to completion in five or six sessions of afternoon and evening.  Continuing till long after midnight by electric light at a table by a flickering fire and dark chocolate whereas two years previous i would have been smoking 
instead.

Anyway, this is no 'how to' lesson, just a desire to share beauty with some depth, and harmony in a world of harm and money.  There are no superficial tricks or techniques other than what you are free to invent or discover or otherwise stumble upon, and who am i to tell anyone or anything how to be uniquely herself, himself, or itself?


Besides, on a beautifully abundant but barbarically backward planet microcosmically one-with boundless vastness of unknown infinity (aren't we all?) with its insanely orchestrated wars, cultures of corruption and commerce, artworks are sold for prices in hundreds of millions while simultaneous millions are being rendered homeless, stateless, hopeless without food and water and those who've lost the plot literally call the shots and we wish it would all get better overnight while some get rich and famous for predicting it will.

So by contrast as a healing counterbalance and with the best of intentions attentively managing to manifest an actual artifact of unstained intrinsic benevolence integrating random traces and touches of refinement accumulating to a density of richness visually equivalent to an illuminated vision of good news shared freely, and call it 'Evoking Autumn'. ~

~~~~  ~~~~  ~~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker

(Appreciative comments welcome.  Click on title heading.)

GROUP OF LUPINS.

Meanwhile momentarily emerging from many more moons or months of minimal motivation.  Wondering what to paint and why for want of any potentially incendiary incentive to move to make a mark or spark of inspiration.


While well aware the wide world with its wilful wanton ways wild words and weather and war and more the unsuspected invisible tricks and traps all fall for.  Aware the world already overflows with endless arts beyond imagining in huge halls in all cities of the world, how then not be daunted by diversity ?

Wondering what to paint and why, being currently occupied with clipping hedges and grass by hand using an old pair of clippers with wobbly handles, (a brand new pair didn't work on grass at all). I don't use lawnmowers, strimmers, or any power tools, and am averse or allergic to noisy machines so it's a job to keep it in order and when weather or energy levels allow.


Crouched and clipping one of two small front lawns, i paused to look at the lupins proliferating in many large pale pink blooms.  So i went and got the camera and some shots of potentially paintable compositions especially close up.  A subject seeming suitable for a particular kind of brushwork  and to being an image in its own right, something more than just depiction, a subtle but important point.

A painting on canvas 20" by 16" completed in three stages smoothly without niggle or struggle within the space of a week. Pencil drawing stage 1. Working from photo on computer screen, being the most challenging phase requiring a lot of measuring or checking the relative distance between and proportions of shapes so it all fits and with tones indicated so the drawing is complete in itself. Which explains why it can often be hard to make a start.

Stage 2. being simply the tones of light and dark, meaning areas of shadow, along with clarification of form and contour. Defining form so it stands out three dimensionally as volume relative to direction of light source. Integrating the overall structure, sculpturally and no 'tricks' involved but certain optical principles, it's about depth.

Stage 3. Colour clothes the form with feeling. Colour is not merely decorative, it's a relational radiance relative to its context. A frequency or vibration on a spectrum inclusive of all degrees of blend and gradation. As such, its relation to areas of feeling is one of subtlety and precision, density and luminosity, radiance and substance.

In a certain sense the point of the painting is not just its likeness to anything, but its actual vibe, its feeling vibration, as with music. So a lot of focus goes into mixing the exact hue and tone of a colour and in its relation to other colours.

Unfortunately i find that digital photography and digital technology so often falsifies certain colours and changing the source of light won't necessarily correct it, and it changes the whole feeling.  A prime example here being the blueish tone of the wall, which in the actual painting has more of a subtle hint of violet in it 
and a slightly deeper tone which works better within the whole.  You get more the colour if you look from an angle below the screen.  So much for the unquestioned quote: "A bad workman blames his tools", sometimes tools are faulty.  Never trust a blind robot.  You can quote me on that.

Here's the painting under electric light.

  It gains on the wall and loses on the lupins.

All these finer points are aspects of an intent.
The painting is basically a conscious focus and application of positive energy. Being a creative response to the undeniable awareness that the degree of corruption throughout what we call 'civilization' can be more accurately regarded as madness. Which is obvious to the degree that one is aware of it. 

Regarding awareness, we don't know what it is we don't know. We tend to not want to discover what we don't want to know. Understandably. But ignorance is not bliss it's just delusion, liability, and we can't afford that. There are things the nature of which we need to be aware of.

So this is just a sharing glimpse  of something i needed to create as a hopeful counterbalance to let's call it 'the other stuff' going on in the world. A focus on harmony, balance, sanity, benevolence.  No big deal, an uncomplicated, unpretentious beautiful vibe, something to share.  What else to call it but 'Group of Lupins', and meeting the challenge of another thirteen letter title like all the others.  Actually not unlucky as we've been misled to believe due to the date the Cathar inquisition was staged, but apparently a higher octave.  I suppose the lupins really do resemble a group of radiant beings involved in conversation. ~

 

     ~~~~  ~~~~  ~~~~

  Martin Rainbowmaker

P.S. Any layout errors solely due to unaccountably temperamental tech, a 'preview' device that lies erratically, and a long struggle with a malfunctioning mouse.

PLANETARY DAWN.

I confess to being at a loss for words of relevance to having just completed a new painting.  What else can i say?  Only because of never knowing if, when, or how such might happen again despite intimate familiarity with the process.  Hard to explain that it requires a specific motivation rather than to just be produced to order.

The universal collective rising groundswell urge to manifest a planetary dawn of humanity the self-evident source of inspiration for that which simply wishes to be expressed and the discomfort involved due to its being subject to oppression.

So why paint, but to participate in a process of patterning transformation which has as much to do with refined sensitivity of touch as with anything else, most often to the point of almost imperceptible whispers. 

So, in needing this activity as a sustained therapeutic focus i chose to take a chance on an image almost abstract in consisting of a spatial arrangement of flows of colour and tone while still evoking a recognizable realm and essence of benevolent radiance.  The challenge of how to make something out of next to nothing.

As shown in the photo, how else to start but by making a loose approximation as a foundation.  Then you've got something to work with.  You don't just get there in one step necessarily.  It's a process of modifying, enhancing, altering, augmenting, emphasizing, adding to or taking away.  As with carving or sculpting, except with painting you can always put it back. 

It's always a shock how different a painting looks depending on the light, whether electric or daylight.  Working late into the night it can seem complete, with colour and tone, dark and light, warm and cool in the intended balance.  Then later by daylight it may appear to be more of a washed out bland nothingness or some other imbalance, and hard to know which is the correct balance.

That of course happened with this painting, particularly as it's predominantly atmospheric without objects. Especially how certain colours registered when photographed. The digital camera amplified certain colours and tones relative to others, falsifying the actual relationships. It's usually difficult to get an accurate photo because a painting consists of subtle and precise relationships.However, modifying the painting accordingly in the fourth session  evolved into a harmonizing and integration of all areas.  A rhythm of intuitive and restrained touch.  Idiosyncratic minimal modification in silent mind mode of meditative attentive immersion.  Envisioning dawn in dimension of depth and distance in the eye of imagination.

Waves of deft dabs deepening density, raising radiance by blending boundaries.  With squinted gaze and tweaking numerous nuisances of anomalous nuance moving more towards mystic majestic but who would even notice?  Momentarily standing rapt brush in hand then just let it be.  Planetary dawn?  What other kind of dawn is there?  Well it makes 'yet another' thirteen letter title.  ~

~~~  ~~~  ~~~  ~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker.

IMAGES OF PEACE.

A blast from the past ?  Well, not a blast at all, quite the opposite, an image of peace.  One of only two photos i have of paintings i was doing in 1968.  Despite minor blemishes on the transparency being otherwise typical of the innocently romantic peace oriented paintings at that time.

Trying back then with little success to sell paintings on the street, i was approached by a millionaire to produce one painting a week and paid just enough for rent and food. Also did some Zodiac sign posters and attempts at book illustration.

After a couple of years i had a small exhibition at his gallery.  Simultaneously i and my flatmates had to move out and became homeless.  We also happened to meet three people from San Francisco with a van and went off to the South of France with no money and just our guitars and completely abandoned the paintings.


With regard to visual expression of peace, i wonder how often it happens that someone somewhere on earth imagines for a moment a world that's NOT militarized, monetized, industrialized, mechanized, technocratized, digitized, politicized, tyranized, hypnotized, tranquilized, etc.  You know, civilized, and what would it look and feel like ?

Some more recent images.

For there to have been no war anywhere within living memory or even for a thousand years.  Or even any mass poverty, sickness, or soft slavery called civilization, having long ago grown beyond the artificially created need for such things.

Hard for anyone to imagine never mind express with any degree of excellence, and most would be totally sceptical about such an optimally desirable natural state and regard the idea as being merely immature idealistic (admittedly wishful) fantasy and not practical or even possible.  Yet given a choice you'd think such a positive situation would be passionately and unanimously preferable.  What is it with human beings ?

Peace, whatever we take that to mean, refers to a state of being.  The outer manifestation of that, being a reflection and shared participation of inner peacefulness.  It's strange that people seem to imagine that peace would be boring.  If challenge is the issue try imagining collective peace in a world where armed conflict is global big business with huge ongoing vested interests.  There's nothing stranger and more boring than that being so for thousands of years.   

Given that according to the ancient Vedic system of cycles of thousands of years we are said to still be barely out of the age of Kali, the darkest of cycles and age of quarrels.  Then a sense of the evolutionary significance of peace and its creative expression aught to be nurtured from an early age as a basic of education.

If you type 'images of peace' into a computer you'll most likely get endless variations of hands and doves and globes and sunrise reflections, not to mention more than a smattering of upside-down 'peace symbols' which unfortunately in that position symbolically and magically impart something more ominous.  Whereas the right way up it's obviously a tree of life, a being with limbs raised and is in fact a Rune named 'Algiz', used to neutralize negative energy and ground it in the earth, apparently.  What is it with humans ?
I mean, imagine if collectively we were actually good at expressing peace. ~ 

~~~  ~~~  ~~~  ~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker

TIDES AND SKIES.

Not without intrinsic significance that i just managed to create a new painting against seeming odds and have the means to share it.  Not just any old painting either, but one that is satisfactory and has a good feeling about it, a sensitive benevolent vibe. 

The pneumonia in March i spoke of two posts previously completely sabotaged my creative flow, and until a few days ago in the first week of September i was without inspiration, motivation, or meaning, and unable to create or innovate much of anything for six months and even that doesn't describe it.


As with any activity, painting requires a certain level of energy to even begin, and i haven't exactly got my energy back yet, tending to rest a lot.  So i still wonder at having painted this: 'Tides and Skies', 20" by 16", in just three afternoons, thinking it would last longer to give me something to do.

With a need to verify that i hadn't irrevocably lost touch with the creative spark, which is how it felt, and for want of a visual concept that wasn't just arbitrary or predictable.  Difficult to adequately explain that, as it's a subtle point.  Not just anything will do.  It's plain to see what isn't 'it' but hard to imagine what is, and equally hard to describe why.

Serendipitously though, and not a month before time with the near total overcast of the so-called 'Cloud of Unknowing', a miniscule glimpse of an idea engaged my attention.  Iconic like an archetype, a certain soft blend of tinted colour, a horizontal drift of streamline spatial arrangement nothing too complex.  Being but a photo on a youtube video clip i was listening to which clicked as possible foundation for further improvisation and source of inspiration.

Best not to focus only on what the image depicts it's simply a vehicle for feeling.  Better to silently feel through the eyes in a receptive way.  Feel the taste of colour as you would savour a flavour or flow with music, receptive without grasping or projecting, sensitive to the subtle texture of feeling.

I hint at all this only because it's of the essence and perhaps too elusive to be caught or taught. Who can find exact words for qualities and if they exist who would recognize them as such?
Perhaps that's one good reason to paint.  ~

 ~~~~  ~~~~  ~~~~ 

Martin Rainbowmaker