Monday 30 September 2013

A ROSE, NOT A ROSE.

On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 09:06 PM , Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:


A ROSE, NOT A ROSE.


ROSE SPELT EROS, martin law, Aug 2013 Up-Close
“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.


ROSE SPELT EROS, martin law, Aug 2013 Up-Close
Mindful if you grasp,
the bloom becomes a rasp.
The petals you adore
but if you grasp for more
a ROSE becomes a SORE.


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.~

Rainbowmaker

ROSE SPELT EROS, martin law, Aug 2013



Art:
ROSE SPELT EROS, martin law, Aug 2013

Close-up Photos, martin law


Wednesday 25 September 2013

PAINTING ROSES.

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 09:12 PM, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:


PAINTING ROSES.

A brief update of work in progress. I like to share the process, show the stages it goes through. I'm not trying to mystify anybody, and i hope it will be helpful to somebody somewhere.


I took a good photo of my roses in bloom. Enlarged it to canvas size and made a tracing to show where the shapes and details go. Traced it on to primed canvas meticulously by putting strong pencil shading on the back of the tracing, only where the lines are and with a soft pencil (4B). Then, taping it in place, and with a hard pencil (4H) followed the network of lines, and it's transferred to canvas.






Roses are a complex challenge to paint authentically, so much subtle detail in the petals. So i decided to do a two stage tracing, the first one just for the black shadow areas.

Filling in the black areas with paint, ( a whole night's work at least), but itching to get some colour into it. So i did.

Suddenly, tired of tedious following guidelines, i departed from the tracing altogether and instead, with a soft pencil (4B) started drawing the petal forms by eye.

Just as suddenly, i departed from this and drew directly with brush and colour and no guidelines.

Even though it wasn't as accurate it gained in spontaneity, freeing 'the spirit' of roses with no loss of botanical authenticity.
 

Layers of modification and fine-tuning can be added and tidied up later. But it's all about a balance of 'feeling' and 'discernment', and i took two good photos at this stage to clearly show what i mean by these words.

The roses seem to be emerging fluently after only one session. A nice stage of evolution to be at. Of course, i have been doing this all my life. But there's no trick to it. Only that, the more you do what you love to do, it evolves by itself.

 




So, there. I hope this is of use to you, wherever you may be.

One showing is worth a thousand sayings”, as the Zen people do actually 'say.'

While i am born under the sign of The Bull...
i don't charge 'anything.'


$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Rainbowmaker%





Photos: Painting Roses Process 1&2, martin law, 28 August 2013

Thursday 19 September 2013

THE GYPSY CHILD.

On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 05:02 PM, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:


THE GYPSY CHILD.

Long ago as the crow flies, down a rough track to an empty cottage in a boggy hollow below a hill in Wales.
Late in the season of nineteen-seventy, with no direction known and the crisp oak leaves muttering in the chill of late autumn.


Gypsy Child Illustrations, martin law


In an upstairs bedroom, hidden in the night, by candlelight on dusty floorboards, reclining on a bare mattress and propped against a pillow, doodling with pencil and paper.

Wild memory traces of Hendrix and gypsies, nocturnal trains of association in the Dylan Thomas poetic mode of innocent muse inspiration blended together and distilled evoking random snail trails of images.

The storm has blown away to the west...” Not stopping to consider if that's where it would have gone. It felt right, westering and slumber, nightfall and dreams, echoes of William Blake.

Where the golden light still gleams...” A paraphrase of Blake's younger friend and pupil Samuel Palmer, and his 'Valley of Vision', “...e'er the golden light still gleams, lingering as if loth to part”, approximate quote.
The horses are settling down to rest, ... and your eyes are full of dreams.” A descriptive picture emerging. Ah, the innocence of unpolluted imagined imagery. Songs of Innocence and Experience, all in the name of art.

Within two years and yet another down time lost in London, abruptly boarding a train and went west, as fate dictates, crossing the water, landing with nothing but ten pence, in Ireland, 'Inis Fodhla', Island of Destiny.

The layers and waves of diversity are complex to chart.
So i skip the tips of icebergs, sticking to the song in question, namely, 'Gypsy Child.' Such a concentration of experience being suspended within the icebergs themselves. Not that memory is really set in stone, or ice, what is reflected being subject to your angle of vision.


Gypsy Child Illustrations, martin law


...”The flames they leap while the ravens sleep.
Your long hair flowing free.
The shivering drops when the rain has stopped,
and the stars above the trees.”

During the two and a half years spent with my twin daughters after they were born, i made a childrens' book based around the song. With colour illustrations on every page. Titled: 'Gypsy Jack in the Tumbledown Shack.' Beginning, “Gypsy Jack lives in the back of a ramshackle tumbledown blackberry shack. Down at the endy of a dusty old track with two gypsy horses 'Snow White' and 'Jet Black.'


Gypsy Child Illustrations, martin law


Thinking to get it published, and having made a hand coloured copy for my daughters, i later got stuck in London again where i showed it to various publishers.
It wasn't what anybody was looking for in the world of big business. Being a rather 'too romantic' expression of a healthy lifestyle for kids. No guns, no monsters, and no machines, just simple timeless country life from another age.

Despite the colour, one publisher in a streamlined highrise office reception said,”I think you're really a 'black and white man'.” While there's no lack of colour prejudice everywhere, how do you answer to being called “a black and white man”? Except to insist you're 'a person of colour.'



Gypsy Child Illustrations, martin law



After preserving the book, text and artwork, in a plastic bag for twenty five years, it was eventually stolen by a Swedish person in Ireland who'd promised to publish it in Gaelic for the schools. I've just found i have eight photocopies of some of the illustrations remaining.
But back to the song.

...”The music played as the campfire blazed,
in a clearing down under the trees.
The horses coughed and the gypsies laughed
and the smoke rose high to the leaves.”


Gypsy Child Illustrations, martin law


I've lived in Ireland now for over forty years. A year or two ago, i did some minimal shopping in town, which included a packet of lotus incense. Then went for a short walk in the grounds of the local 'stately home', where i realized the incense was missing.

Back in town, about to return to the cafe, about to close, where i thought i must have left it. When a man i didn't recognise crossed the road to ask if i was 'Martin.'
A brief chat as i mentioned the incense and the cafe about to close.

Here it is,” as he handed me the lotus incense, “I found it in the road.” More to the point, how did he recognise me?

He went on to explain. He'd heard me regularly singing 'Gypsy Child', my first written song, in 'The Good Karma' restaurant in Dublin back in the early seventies, when he was a teenager. Not only that, but he's been singing it continuously around the folk clubs in Dublin ever since!

'The Good Karma' was the Republic's first ever vegetarian restaurant, situated at 4 Great Strand street, off Caple St. Dublin.



Gypsy Child Illustrations, martin law



Founded by a brilliant friend and artist no longer with us, Bob Bartlett, bless you Bob, your friends and both your families since dispersed. The Good Karma burned down to the ground some years after, with the loss of life of Eamon, poet and sponsor who went back in to rescue a kitten. Bob later drowned in a sudden storm one night crossing from Schull harbour to Long Island, West Cork where he lived with his two families. I was on the island at the time it happened.

Well, with the incense, and the song and much experience in common, Tarlach and i had to go and discuss this over a coffee and, as he had his guitar with him, to compare notes so to speak.



Gypsy Child Illustrations, martin law



Amazing how a simple song can travel through time and space.

So now the fire is settling down
and the caravan windows shine bright.
The winds just sigh and the nightbirds fly,
Go softly and blow out the light.”

You're a lonesome child of a gypsy wild
and the night is calling you home.
Your sleepy eyes by the campfire light,
where the pines and the wild winds moan.”



Gypsy Child Illustrations, martin law


So perhaps a story is never lost but simply morphs into yet another fractal, this being the latest one.

Now, thousands of people must have heard it on the blog. I know gypsies are known to get around.
This one obviously has a life of its own.~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rainbowmaker




Art: Gypsy Child Illustrations, martin law


Friday 13 September 2013

In agreement

On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 1:36 AM, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> Thanks, yes, it is a great post, i'm with you on presentation of text before image, it works well.  Good point about people and imagination, putting the description of the art before the art itself so people are given the chance to try and picture it and use their own imagination before seeing it, especially after generations of being told, "ah that's just your imagination", like saying, "if you escape from the box of 'what's real' you're in unreality and might even become insane', when the opposite is true, "normality" is a fear based comfort zone which is not comfortable and obviously not sane.  A prominent psychiatrist recently abandoned his career after discovering normality doesn't exist.
I'd say, people are more likely to become 'insane' due to being afraid to explore imagination, children are comfortable with living imaginatively till they're told "genius is to madness closely allied", or "great artists are mad", i mean you might freak out and chop your ear off and get put away where you can create in peace.  Genius is natural, cowering in a box is paranoia.  Inner exploration keeps you flexible, curious, sane in a world of paranoids living in imaginary boxes.  A box is a symbol of finite limitation where what defines it as so is the infinite surrounding it in all directions forever.  Limitation pretends to measure that which is beyond (there's always a beyond to a limitation) , thereby demonstrating that limitlessness is everything and includes every 'thing.'
Besides, what's a 'thing', without infinite 'no-thingness' to define it?
Art, far from being something you hang up to cover a crack in the box, is anything you perfect to the point of artless artistry, which requires fearless imaginative intention, attention, and flawless skillfulness and a refusal to hide it in a box.
All of our combined abilities are making this accessible to people suffering from imaginary cardboard claustrophobia and 'angst' about Bandora's Pox.
I ducked into a cafe today to get warm.  I came to town without a leather jacket and the wind stream was North North West despite sunshine, and sat down to a bowl of hot soup.  Quickly realized the imaginative level of the crowded cafe
was also low on the psychic barometer purporting to be 'familiar reality.'  Its familiarity was all too familiar but its reality was distinctly questionable.  So ingesting the soup i flew the coup and ordered three bags of coal having studied the wind direction for the coming ten days, checked it's a new moon and sniffed the air periodically.  I mean you can't deal with the unexpected unless you can imagine all possibilities.  Imagination is real because it's experience and if you doubt your experience you can't trust your doubt either.

Yes, i like "Art for Playful Evolution: APE."  Creativity Inhibits Anguish: CI..oops!  Fearful thought shuts down the immune system.  Positive expectation reduces stage fright.  Why believe 'any' thought anyway?  It's limiting possibility.
It's nice to know i'm not just who i think i am.  Allows freedom to be something i didn't think of.  When was the sky ever a limit?   I think, we're all doing a great job.
Oh sod, i've written another article!  "Blogger!!"
Cheers, Des Lyxic. a.k.a. Ramone Baker.
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""!

Friday 6 September 2013

TRIPLE GODDESS.

On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 04:13 PM, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

TRIPLE GODDESS.

Imagine the sound of sparkling water, welling up from a mountain spring.

Multiples of artistic notions in perpetual motion bubbling fresh from a deep source , in the shade of some sacred and secluded place.

And why wouldn't they? The creative imagination is fertile ground, when well watered and tended. Kept free of blockages or obscuration by entanglements, allowing irrigation its exploration of inspiration and its cultivation, so on and so forth.

Water is spiritual. 'M-nee', the Lakota word, declares, “Me spiritual,” 'm-nee-HA-ha' (waterfall), 'm-nee-E-ha-ha' (trickling water), hence “laughing water”.
Pollute at your peril. No laughing matter.

Artistic notions perpetual, spring to mind, spirit voice singing, ringing, refining, filtering through a sparkle of shimmering shining pebbles.

Wise to make notations of these notions as and when they bubble forth. Water has a voice.

Not all notations follow through, some are set aside.

Some remain, spilling into pools of mind, milling around, further refined.


Triple Goddess, martin law, 2013



A pencil portrayal of potential painting upscaled in embryonic tracing. TRIPLE GODDESS being the most recent to coalesce and crystalize in the current flow.

What is that?” You may well ask, anticipating a definitive answer to satisfy the left brain label sticker, instead of receptively, silently seeing. Feeling through the eyes without comment.

Very well then: The inverted equilateral triangle IS the female principle, apex pointed to earth like an ovipositor.

Triple convergent points naturally generate concentric circles. So much for the allusion to anatomy.

All is contained within a circle, the natural material manifestation of spirit in organic form. Symbols work on many levels.

The spaces between, evoke revolving axe blades. Goddesses know how to look after themselves.

Celtic in feeling, without the elaboration of Celtic knotwork. Simple spaces to fine-tune juxtaposition of precise complementarity of the intimacy of relevant colour, naked and unadorned.

Wo/mandala suspended in esoteric space above the distant rolling coast of Eire shrouded in cloud, where oceans fall as rain. A presiding guardian Goddess, ominous, overseeing surrounding waters.



An icon to invoke in need, while waters of the oceanic world are poisoned by catastrophic leaks of radioactive non-containment which should have been left where it rightly belongs, in the underworld, and Pandora goes unpunished. The icon simultaneously the symbol for hazard.

Water has memory, water has voice, water is spiritual.
Water, is LIFE. Defile Life?! Pollute at your peril ! The TRIPLE GODDESS speaks.~

~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~
Rainbowmaker~



Art: Triple Goddess, martin law, 2013