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. ~
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Martin Rainbowmaker
