Rain on a Sunday.

On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 5:38 PM, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

>>>>... Just clicked the ignition numerous times till the fan belt connected to get the windows open,  Not that i'm living in a fan belt and the egg timer's a bit slow.  Not short of rubber bands but i don't know where they go.  Just called this 'rain on a sunday' to practice 13s.

Otherwise it's a normal grey day much like any other.  Quietly enjoying being totally unindustrious and looking out at the weather now and then and roasting chestnuts on a shovel.  Having scoured the internet already for signs of life all the way to Noah Vale.

 

Just clickety clicked in to say all is wonderful with the blog. The glimpsing screen is fine and i enjoyed glimpsing  and all that stonework should blow a few minds among all those thousands of unknowns who are so literate that they just send me an extra number.

Anyway at least we've got over 13000 who hopefully would rather read about the mystical aspect of roses instead of microchips in the toilet, social breakdown, renegade cops arresting babies and shooting pet cats and squirells in the shopping mall (true), i think our radical saviour the internet needs more than a facelift, it needs an army of roadsweepers and dump trucks and an injection of intelligence (the original meaning of the word) not to mention a shift towards life and a simple cop on to the beauty of the ordinary and a sense of gratitude for getting the battle they asked for.

As i say, just an ordinary grey unindustrious sunday and i did get the nudge to change the clocks last night, something to do with the battle of dark and light (ah not that one again) otherwise the only human interaction was an email from a friend needing an online conversation as her head is in bits and is weeping because nothing's worked out as planned and people wonder why i don't accept invitations and a neighbour parked his bike which still doesn't have brakes to ask to borrow a fiver for tobacco to go with his six pack so i got out a box full of loose change and gave him a handful and a roast chestnut which he was reluctant at first to try as he'd never heard of eating them. Hastening to add as he left that you have to pierce them or they explode all over the place which seemed to unnerve him a little.

Phew it's warm in here must shed another layer of wool.  Do let 'me' know if you find any good websites (must draw the curtain on my opposite neighbours big screen hurley match, distracts my peripherals.)  Ah yes, it's good to draw curtains you don't need to be gifted to do that.  My best ideas come out of the joy of not having to do anything so i can look at what i feel like doing.  Part of the art which i hasten to add is for the benefit of service to others.  Always looking inwards for something more radical ( from the root word meaning root as in radish) something simple and natural as people have forgotten simple and natural preferring viral rumours exposed as deceitful hoaxes, drama is so boring.  Anyway, "to talk but rarely is to be natural", so long as it's not done on purpose then it's a religious affectation and i'm not affected by religion so i'll take a break and see what the present brings, most have to wait for somebody to bring them a present.  Ah the pathos of life...

...STOP !   ...MOP.

Art excerpts from: soft grey skies, martin law, march 2012

"soft grey skies" Blog Archive April 10, 2012

CASTLES OF CORK - Ballinacarriga Castle

Continuum of CASTLES OF CORK.

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Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Art: Ballinacarriga Castle, martin law

art-work : digital panplay, "Castle Puzzle Close-ups", Oct13 - wfp for moo

CASTLES OF CORK.

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 11:45PM , Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

CASTLES OF CORK.

It's just as well that i wasn't dependent on 'Castles of Cork' to keep me afloat, or i might have been lacking in fortification.

Aside from a few choppy waves in the nature of the commisioned transaction there were also the conditions i produced the work under.

Only once before have i ever done something of such architectural exactitude, and that was twelve drawings of local churches in Co. Wicklow for a calendar.

Remarkable, at least to me, if not humourous, is that i didn't have a chair to sit on to comfortably draw the twenty castles and detailed map, working on an unusually low table. So i did the whole work perched on the wooden arm, just two inches wide, of the armchair. However, water off a seagull's back so to speak.

Important to note, all drawings were done solely with a fine sable brush, not a pen.

Which leads me to wonder, are they drawings or paintings, and what's the difference?

Anyway, a test of discipline, as it's something i 'can' do though it's not my cup of tea. Which is a fair enough reason to not do another one of its kind.

At least twenty four hours attentive concentration on each one, which also had to be worked out beforehand on tracing paper. In most cases from the flimsiest of reference and even at times almost none at all.

The prime example being Oilean Beag Castle, the one with the sheer cliffs, which i was told no longer exists but for a few remaining stones where the foundation was, with perhaps a vague bit of an engraving to go by.

Funny thing was, i had a dream that night where i was hovering above the site. In the dream i teleported myself to a sideways on view, distinctly saw the headland with cliffs and crashing waves.

The very next day the author instructed me to reconstruct from imagination a sideways on view, which i did, somehow.

Just look at all that precise stonework. All done with a brush. As if i'd actually been there, back then.

Over all it's an exercise in brush strokes.

Every single one in place. Done so as to imply light and shade and volume, as well as the organic flow patterns and rhythms of nature. I doubt you'll find even one superfluous stroke. The intent being, to make it visionary as well as literal.

Well, the work can speak for itself. Though there's hardly anyone i know of who knows i did them and the author is no longer with us.

Nice though, to think that ultimately they come to be studied and enjoyed by more people. It's seldom if at all that i receive a response from people who see my work.

So what else is new? All that focussed energy must go somewhere.

Just another one of those tests of discipline of what it takes to do a good job. So now you know a tiny bit of what it took, regardless of reward or no reward.~

The book itself, (with the cover replaced by another artist) is:

The Castles and Fortified Houses of West Cork. By Michael J. Carroll.

Bantry Studio Publications, 2001.

Bantry. County Cork.

Martin Law. (Rainbowmaker).

Art: Oilean Beag Castle, martin law

art-work : digital panplay, "Castle Puzzle", Oct13 - wfp for moo

-CASTLES OF CORK - Ballinacarriga Castle

SIX WOMANDALAS.

On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 07:26 PM , Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

SIX WOMANDALAS.

Just sitting

knowing everything

is growing.

~mrbm.

The urge to make signs in the soil. I've been doing it for millions of years in one form or another and i'm not bored.

Mandala, (sanskrit) meaning 'circle.'

Specifically a circle for focus of meditation. Common to humans in all cultures. A sacred circle.

Some mandalas are esoterically complex. Elements within them corresponding to facets of psyche or spirit. Imagine a compass for the soul. Realignment in silent contemplation. As within, so without. As without, so within.

My blood red leaved acer sapling, centre to a twelve foot diameter raised circular lawn, having languished and expired to a mere stick due to density of earth. Its place is tended as a 'soil circle', “hommage to soil for what it provides.”

Which is why i call these mandalas 'womandalas.' I made six womandalas, (a 13 letter title).

Having some affinity with amerindian medicine circles, these ones are simple and step lightly on the earth. Made in meditative attention and inner quiet, using evocative natural objects that could fall to earth anywhere. They are made facing the sun in the south west.

Try arranging a string of beads in a perfect circle on the earth. Any adjustment at one point distorts the circle at another. A primal instruction and meditation in itself.

The plain simple 'doing' without assertion is what the image bears witness to. You might call them prayer wheels. Except i'm not asking for anything, i'm acknowledging what just IS.

Centred. Attentive. Lightly on the earth. Natural without pretence. Plain. Sparing in restraint.

Honouring the female principle in abundance. A sunny day, awaiting the passing of each cloud shadow, 3/9/2013.

Total: 9. A triple triple-Goddess.

Six Womandalas.~

>>>O<<< >>>O<<< >>>O<<<

              rainbowmaker~

soil circle symbol improvisations, martin law, Sep 2013

ABSTRACT ROSES. ( A ramble).

On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 11:53PM , Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

ABSTRACT ROSES. ( A ramble).
In the beginning was The Rose and it was spelt EROS.

The Devil was nowhere to be found in the detail as he hadn't been invented yet.

You can see that for yourself by simply zooming in, through levels of magnification and descending into deep fertile chasms and folds and flying low over bright blooms windblown, composed of seeming random generous giant gestures of sensuous substance.

Primal patchwork impasto and soft touches to pink painted petals, just off the tip of the brush. You'd be amazed what brushes get up to in close up, well i am.

It's a veritable den of zen in there.

With no dark denizens in the detail, only among the dragon lines, flourishes from the 'the angel in the works', translating direct from the TAO Goddess of Flow and all in the mind's eye and your world is where your heart is.

If you can tell a nuance from a nuisance and without stepping back to admire the view, perceive pigment as a possible portal. Without denying the beauty in the eye of the beholder while being aware your projections are in your face.

What can you do for people who, having grown up only to become 'normal' can't bring their love to bear on the sacredness of surfaces to focus longer than a TV logo.

Who subliminally decreed that surfaces weren't as sacred as insides? There's no inside without the outside. As if you can't judge some books by their cover. You don't have to be a 'remote viewer' or a designer of projectiles but dot your eyes, tease your cross and say 'female fairies'.

Some people think beauty is only what they think it is and so no big surprise.

Having forgotten and not remembered, how to read signs that don't just point to something else. The significance 'in them'

not beyond or around them.

I mean, you don't just see 'what's really there'. You simply really see what you really see. If you see it it's there. Call it 'experience now', or don't call it anything at all.

But to return to the point: 'paint.' And mixing metaphors as if they were an indispensable acrylic substance and WONDER why people don't notice nuances or realize aesthetics are the best medicine and taste is not a problem.

  

Having been to an unusual degree metaphorically immersed in paint all my life no small WONDER if rainbows are part of the furniture and dripping spectrums stain the glass. Why have a favourite colour when you have the whole visible spectrum if not a plectrum to play with?

Meanwhile palettes go unpublished, ignored, as if something secondary to the work itself when they're primary and rarely looked into despite being loaded with subliminals and inadvertent other intent.

Blending the black and the white of Mars and Titanium with Permanent Rose. Fine tuned and refined viscous not vicious but water soluble mixing tones from darker to enlightening.

People have the physical and the spiritual living in separate appartments ( as in meant to be apart), and when you put a grid over free association, people get off on the 'forbidden' part and forget the fruit.

Thereby declaring seeds of wars instead of roses and manifest abundance and the people crying in dreams for freedom at peace with itself.

Mixing colours is mutable magic medicine.

It's about refining flavours and sensing significance as with smells and aromas.

It's the spirit of substance and the substance of spirit.

To say, “there is more than meets the eye”, only errs and infers a duality that in reality is apparent but nonexistent.~

~~~~ >>>> ~~~~ >>>> ~~~~ mrbm

Art:

ROSE SPELT EROS, martin law, Aug 2013

Close-up Photos, martin law

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.

“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

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

Art:

ROSE SPELT EROS, martin law, Aug 2013

Close-up Photos, martin law

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

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.

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.

...”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.' “

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.'

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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

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.
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""!

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.

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