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