Monday 26 November 2012

Earth Below Sky. (an art walk).


Oops...

On 21 November 2012 17:07, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:


Ooops, i wrote six pages with a new pen in the art mode up till six prompted by Angela's compliment on such a facility.
Suppose i'll have a fair bit of typing and editing to do of a plethora of perpetual poetic prose.  And now the darkening sky is scowling as i get up and before i get to the granola complete another page in continuum and will have to go out in the rain for water.
Sounds like Celine took a photo of a painting of some sort and last night Phil visited back from England and Roisin rang at the same time must be a conjunction of mercury or something ho hum to pooh pooh’s...
From me, MOP, to Moo re. Ooops,
MRBM ( "ah the waters and the wild,)"



Intending to type.

On 22 November 2012 17:18, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:


..The thing i just wrote on paper went to 7 pages (including additions).
Titled, 'Earth Below Sky'.  (an art walk).
Intending to type and send, i may even send in separate sections in case any glitch occurs.  But numbered and title headed as the original, six consecutive pages.
Wouldn't want a monolithic draft to get blown away.  Draughty enough as it is.  Unity in diversity is preferable to dying in university.
So we must have passed with honours.
With uncrossed fingers for ease of typing.........  herewith, 'Earth Below Sky'.  (an art walk). RBM


Earth Below Sky. (an art walk).


On 22 November 2012 22:27, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:


1.

The innocent eye from where it is planted
on earth below sky so taken for granted
this elusive art which still persists
simply because it's where we exist

Round like a ball where we fly or crawl
in the view from above we're not here at all
to the innocent eye if all war would cease
how would it appear a new world at peace?


I pen those lines, pondering and perusing the perennial question.
Pencil actually.  The pencil being mightier than the particle accelerator, in the right hands, (unless you're left handed).
Since, 'the bozos' didn't find their 'god particle', after squandering our trillions.
What's a god or a particle got to do with it, when it's all waves anyway until you try to pinpoint it?

They could have shared out a few trillion tons of rice with that ungodly amount of money!
Earth below sky, where we live and die, they squander resources, do you think to ask why?

But, so much for contextual consistency. 
Back to the perusing part, cruising for art, and when did 'landscape' actually start?

2.     'A Scape of Land.'

Imagine that the land was imagined as a backdrop, for imaginary religious portraits and icons of imagined nobility.
As if, the backdrop was the Pagan Wild Creation, outside sanctuary courtyard walls and verandas, where beyond is just wild boar and dusky creation myths and slumbering twilight sunsets.

Till a few people slowly started copping on, that, that was and actually is, 'the creation', and they were in above their heads.  After all, isn't it about equality in diversity and flowing one with the way of it?

And but, The Noble Icon People, were good at exacting donations, [sic] and added more noble courtyards.
So they could call the shots of what got painted or not.
So the wild esoteric  archaic Gaian gathering in pristine Pagan Eden , unstained and white in tooth and claw, went into the mystic backgrounds and winding trails into Mona Lisa mountains, and so, must have seeped into the backdrop from outside, like damp.
Along with the rising dewy damp of eden, many painted backdrops throughout ecclesiastical monopoly, have been found to have, subtle-ly painted into their medieval skies, a wide variety of easily identifiable, Unidentified Flying Objects.
This is documented in an illustrated book, titled: ' The Alien Chronicles.'

Anyway, slowly, as history seems to go, some artists, bored with being eye-conned by icons, focused their lens on expanding and exploring the potentials of the background, since that's where they lived anyway.
And took fugitive pagan flight through evolving fractals of alternating idealism of the seeming limitations of 'Earth Below Sky.'
But lingering long on the greensward as if it were 'a setting' for token bacchanalians to disport in a private mystic grove in the corner of a vast sublime vista.

3.  'Meanwhile in China.'

Meanwhile in China, they were mountain ranges ahead in depicting the archaic habitat.  With customary calligraphic brush and water with dilutions of black ink sticks and fluid literati curvilinear gestures one with the 'Tao.'
Landscape painting was regarded as the highest form of Chinese painting.
From the 'Five Dynasties' period to the 'Northern Song' period, (907- 1127) is known as the Great Age of Chinese Landscape.

Of course, there were aristocratic icon people there too.  Strolling in rustic mountain courtyards made of wood among bamboo and thatch, and the mist through pine obscures the autumn moon.
Some artists were semi solitary hermit monks, self-depicted correctly as small in what's called ' the scheme of things.'
Mindfully meditative, in empty attentiveness to the gnarled swirl of a soft 'water and ink loaded' dewdrop of a bamboo brush. 
Delineating calligraphically, intrinsic organic character of leafy outcrop of rock and root, in minimal monochrome tonality like dewdrops on a web.
Being in the mist in the midst of unprecedented mountain peaks and sentinels, they developed a vertical perspective as well as a horizontal one.  Cracking the Earth / Sky coded koan of above and below, in a synthesis of non-duality.

Which reminds me of Van Gogh, just as he was reminded by them.  Our man Vincent, or as they say in america, 'Van, go!'
Van the Man.  As famous for his ear as yer man Morrison is for his music.
But this is no history lecture or language course of course.

It's more a matter of, 'what does the word 'brushstroke' evoke?  And if, nothing, then what do they look like exactly?
Speaking in patchwork intuitive hemisphere syntax,  whether, the backdrop of noble courtyards, bamboo under autumn moon, or pointillists, impressionists, and post-impressionist abstract expressionists, Vincent's dots and dashes ingraining the terrain with a maddening mistral of multiplied marks.

4.   Making Magic Marks.

Similarly, Jackson Pollock, immersed in his paint pot drip and slash trance dance, said: "the hand having made a mark moves on."  Well that's a revelation, perhaps he was pushed for time. 
And what with the left hand not knowing what the right is doing, but falling where it will, and coalescing into an organically choreographed web of single gestures like a Chinese landscape scroll but different. 
Scattered like a windfall of cherry blossom, or the seeds of Vincent's 'sower', or like leaving the freshly fallen yellow leaves where they fall.

If that's a sort of jazz improvisational mode or rhythm, passed from painter to painter, then, Alan Davie, artist from Scotland took up the theme.  His long white hair and beard like a druidic Gandalf,  making magic marks in the mystic paganic mode of Pan and Zen.  Obliterating and overpainting with the richness seeping through.
After nearly a century of creative exploration and ever the innocent eye, he's well worth searching out on the internet.
I found myself at a formative stage, impressed by a huge exhibition of his at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

Simultaneously seeing the work of Samuel Palmer, a young friend of William Blake.  Under a harvest moon in his 'valley of vision' among  'The Shoreham Ancients',
Similar surfaces of dotted and clotted  archaic foliage, and touches of bark and dark  ripe cornfields curve in the mode of earthy organic, below 'The Bright Cloud' cumulous cluster towering above a hayfield corner down into leafy thicket of alders
in dense neolithic shade, with a hint of classic poetics, and sepia silhouettes in the ancient wildwood and so forth, and like the windblown harvest poetry of Gerard Manly Hopkins.

And ultimately, again, surfing the webwork, type search for variations of  'a world at peace'.   Scanning hundreds of glimpses of how 'earth below sky', is, in the collective psyche, and learn to discern the high and the low of the health of aspiration which evokes re-enchantment of the organic, over the creeping bionic technosphere.
So expressing 'earth below sky' in the optimum mode of our interrelationship.

5.     The Elusive Art.

So how does the Earth, bathed in peace, look?
I switched on the cybercom to get another glimpse into multiple slices of collective imagination.
While fully aware that whatever the level of HARMONY that flows through you, is what anything ever looks like.

Despite the mainstream flow through and tributaries of, images focusing on the absence of peace, Bound to affect openness of spirit and perception accordingly.  A contraction of the aura of finer faculties in fact.
In the face of deception, a creative use of IMAGINATION, carries conception into perception.  The world appears as you relate with it.
What you love, looks 'lovely', healing the rift between self and other.

If you search variations on 'a world at peace' expecting images of sublime beauty, you may well be disenchanted with the collective health of the world's imagination.
It seems we think in clichés when it comes to imagining positive vision.
Hands, hearts, doves, and globes, and every CND Peace Symbol upside down (that might explain a lot).
The peace symbol with the branches pointing up, is exactly the 'protective rune',  for 'Z',  called Algiz.  "Protective Power that grounds destructive energy."
Symbols apart, it's hard to find images from fertile imagination of what peace across the land would look like.
Tentative diagnosis:  There's a blind spot in the collective imagination.
Our notion of extraordinary, tends toward the grotesque, or conversely to stylized idealistic sentiment.
We're good at imagining bad things, and bad at imagining good things.  Like 'a world at peace', how would you know what that might look like?
Or, would it look much the same as it does, yet your perception is vastly enhanced.
As Bruce Lipton demonstrates via contagious knowing enthusiasm, when a life form, or a cell for that matter, (and we are a colony of them) has a harmonious loving relationship with its' presumed habitat, it freely expands to be anything it can imagine itself to be.

6.   The Innocent Eye.

Try to imagine how the natural realm would look, in a world that had known a long established peace for, at least, a thousand years.  How would it look?  In what way different from how it looks already? 
That would be a socially and individually beneficial art play project in schools i think.
A polar antidote to 'violent play' station war games training.   A world in need, indeed.
Exploring many modes of it and into the abstract.  Everything has the abstract within it somewhere when go go deep into it.
'An ' 'abstract' is still colour, texture, and forms in space, whether suspended in the cosmos, between the radio telescope and the microscope and all levels between.

So i browse through multiple monochromatic images of Dutch Landscape art.  An extreme challenge of 'earth below sky', given the topography at hand.  One which often worked well in expressing the sublime as expressed by the biosphere.
Infinite scape of density encompassed within the etherial plane, and all the nuances of the terrain.
Or, have a look at George Inness,  america's complement to John Constable, of whose work Blake exclaimed, "That's not painting that's Vision."

I do like a realm you can enter into, whether by path or depth of feel or field. Uncharted territory open to individual exploration, or a challenging minefield of imagination.  In that, a mode has to be rediscovered, in order to be authentic with no pretence.
Sweeping generalisations, but what you bring to bear, in 'bare attention', and how the medium is applied is what will manifest as feeling.  To the innocent eye, there's masses of mediocrity to see through.

And what of 'The Celtic Realm'?  Now there's something in need of deeper depth probes.  Serious delving, away from tourist mind traps and fixed caricatural notions.  So don't fear the friendly dark of the wildwood, the path is still there.
Lest you slip into forgetfulness and go only for gold, forgetting the green, only to return, white and disenchanted.
A wanderer among dark streams and velvet twilight, modal tones and firelight on flickering hush of tapestry walls.
That's a good a note to end on as any.
Doubtless to be continued.   RBM  aka martin.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



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