WAY OFF THE MARK.

On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 03:26PM , Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

WAY OFF THE MARK.

If you're looking for a way, you're lost.

If you've found the way, you're not where you want to be yet.

If you're not interested you'll stay the way you are and never evolve.

A way that can be described, prescribed, and followed is not the way itself. No way.

What's a way anyway? And who needs one?

( With the whole emphasis on WHO?)

If you don't know who it is who needs one how would you know if a way was necessary?

Or, you might say you've found the way to be just where you are. Impossible. There is no way to where you are.

If you need a way, you must think you're going somewhere else other than here and now. When were you ever 'somewhere else?' I don't mean outwardly. I mean you.

When were YOU ever somewhere else? Where ELSE can you be? Go there and see if you're somewhere else.

How on earth can here and now go somewhere? Why would it want to? I'm not talking spatially. Space is the context that seems to define you, by seeming to be where you think you are not.

Is that where you are? Always in the centre of where you're not.

Is this clear, or is it so damn confusing you'd rather go somewhere else and change your mind? If you've half a mind to change your mind you really will be confused.

Like being two people and one wants to change the other but they're both you, so if you succeed you fail.

But if you let your mind wander it'll fool you into thinking it's thoughts are yours, instantly.

So whatever thoughts occur, that wil be who you think you are, continuously, with never a break.

If you try and stop the process you will think that's who's doing it. Funny isn't it? Or not?

If you decide that it really doesn't matter, how then will you find out if it really does or not?

A conclusion is supposed to come at the end, not the beginning. Otherwise you just have a closed mind.

What's a mind anyway? Apparently nobody knows. Not even scientists, psychologists, biologists, yet we take it for granted and say,”I have one.”

If i say “Show me,” you can't because you've never seen one and neither of us knows where it actually is, no it's not just in the head. So you make a show of giving me a piece of your mind.

“Well of course,” you say, “it's invisible, but i can hear it.” Could just be those thoughts again, tricking themselves into thinking you can actually 'have' what you 'are,' and simultaneously therefore 'are' what you can 'have.'

Are you bored yet?

Don't we just set up situations that define us to ourselves, and they always involve a lot of other people whether we like it or not, and the majority of them are no longer present?

Who would we be without them? Or who are we with or without them? Do 'they' know?

To know your experience isn't it pointless to ask somebody else? Let alone believe what they may say. How, do you think, they could experience what it is to be you?

There's a lot of projection goes on. Everywhere, pretty much continuously. Movies of love and hate, advance and retreat, welcome and denial.

Funny isn't it? Not always. Not usually.

Especially as it's being acted out physically, collectively, against itself.

If you depend on what you're not, to define what you are, you're lost. Or at least can't claim to be independent. “To see ourselves as others see us,” no thanks. Don't think so.

More often than not, we're way off the mark.

But we don't like to realize or even consider that.

It makes us unsure who we are. But who am i to talk? ~

~~ Rainbowmaker/ ? ~

Photos: "Way off the mark", techman-moo for Rainbowmaker

Words For Birds re-feature

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 11:17 PM, Martin Law martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com wrote:

Words For Birds.      ( A Celebration.)

Small words, for small birds.  Common or garden words.
Words worthy of song for songbirds.
Almost empty, the brown paper bag of peanuts under the kitchen sink.

Feeding a small fire.  Down to my last bit of coal, awaiting delivery.
Plenty of chopped spruce chunks though. 
Stand them on end in the hearth, to dry out.

Economizing on the coal.  Fastidious and precise,
the frugal art of getting through, staying warm.
Small things mean something.  Small things matter.
Civilizations waging war over vanishing gold and silver. 

Twin logs hiss in the grate, like rain.  Shift, settle, to crackle and spark.
'Mystic-peach' glow, loud sharp cracks.  Yellow flame.
Black tongues give a gift of coal.












Smooth branchy willow saplings, just a hand's-grip around.
Upsurge from an ivy clump of ground.
A gusty webwork, where, small head-tailed birds flawlessly flit and perch.  Perch and flit from branch to twig, bold punctuations on a musical stave. More new arrivals perch tier on tier.

Nothing ever, quite so Zen, as small birds.
Infallible flitters with a firm grasp.
Weightless, never subject to volition:
I witness many a tight 'U-turn' on an instant in mid-flight.

While my neighbours sit facing flickering football screens, i stand rapt,
cup in hand, in the kitchen.
Fast fluttering flits from peanut beak to branch, with never, ever, a single mistake.
Is that not cause for wonder?

They are more at one with the wind, than a weatherman will ever be.
If you wish to witness miracle, it will cost you peanuts.

When we were "granted dominion", so it is said, was it not meant that we would attend to our 'furred and feathereds’' needs and seeds.
The only 'reward', is endless wonder. 

Willow:  'Saileach', 'Crann saili,' a Taurus-totem tree, to 'the Celts.'
Signifying, 'The Observer.'
Ruled by the moon, and the lunar realm.
Mystical, intuitive, creative, and psychic.
With an understanding of cycles and seasons, (the patience attributed to Taurus).



Bursting with potential, though with a preference to working behind the scenes. It is the power of perception and memory, which allows the true nature to blossom.

I am blessed with a willow in the window, as well as the wind in the willows. A welcome compensation, for a Taurean, who spent ten years with nothing but a blank grey wall in every window.  Previous tenants cut this willow down to the ground four times.
So i'm happy now it's as high as the house.

My most frequent visitors are, sparrows, chaffinches, blue-tits,
(Blue-tits seem to function on a very high frequency.)
Then there may be a blackbird or two, male and female.
Sometimes a sudden band of speckled starlings will descend,
and, a lone robin.

Next in line, when they get wind of the chatter and flurry, are rooks, crows, magpies. Though my neighbours’ two ring-doves usually hear of it before they do, and the small birds don't find them threatening.

Unlike the rooks and crows, warily awaiting their opportunity,
from surrounding lookout posts.
Chimney-tops, guttering, roof-ridges and telephone wires.
Then, they swoop like black-cloaked witches in a raid.

Since they eat faster, i put the peanuts between the base
of the willow and the thorny rosebush
as a semi-deterrent to a direct swoop.

They are also, by far the most wary of human intervention,
and instantly alert to a clack of fingernails on a windowpane.

Let no man doubt their mystical cooperative intelligence however,
commanding respect, admiration.  Forget 'football.'
When we call them 'greedy', we might stop and wonder,
just who it is we're talking about.
So, no questions asked, why i don't have a cat.

A friend of mine was visited often by a robin, which regularly
came in the open door,
almost to the edge of her plate.
Seasons being somewhat seasonally cyclic, she's the first person i've heard of, to have a much-used robin-flap instead of a cat-flap.

Native peoples and others with long experience, say that the birds are
the sentries of the natural world.

They are aware, (naturally) of significant conditions and aspects of
the changing world around us, and signal it in song.
There is a book, on Amazon, i would like to read.  It's called:
'What The Robin Knows.'  (How Birds Reveal The Secrets Of The Natural World.)'
Written by, Jon Young.

Intuitively, i've been feeling something in the robin's song for a long time.
It always sounds like a direct message delivered as if with intent.
Always, uncannily close at hand, and at a specific moment,
and slightly modified within the context of the seasons.
I must pay closer attention, and with a silent mind.

Birds don't have a 'larynx' as we do.  They have a 'syrinx, located in the 'thorax'.  (Syrntax!)
Witness the breast feathers when he sings.
A plaintive, almost wise-sad, tinsel-like ripple
of crystaline quicksilver droplets, dribbled
like a wry timely reminder.


( A wren, apparently, sings about 56 notes per second.
How many do we register from our slower rate of attention?)
I wonder.

I painted ' The Irish Robin' portrait in January 1983.
Alone, in my small caravan, out on The Burren. County Clare,
where i lived for three and a half years.














I clearly remember, working on it, painstakingly.
Sitting close to the window for the remaining daylight.
All those tiny feathers!
It was cold, even with the wood stove.
I award myself a tiny feather, for persistence.

'Robin Redbreast'.  (A robin is not 'red'. though the american equivalent may be.)
It's orange with a hint of brown.  There was no english word for orange till the 1600's.

A twenty foot caravan in a field of cows.  Very remote, very silent, quite alone.
It was snowing. Large soft slow silent flakes.
No 'facilities', such as electricity.  Just gaslight and candle.
My water supply, the river, a field's walk away.  Toilet?
An overhang of hawthorn hedge, a mulch of old leaves.

The painting was photographed two or three years later.
I gave the painting later on, to the youngest son of an ex-partner.  On his request.
He's now taller than i am.
When he was quite young we shared art interactions.
That is, i supplied him with endless paper and he created, the most astonishing things.
One time, with a stack of creations which he explained to me in profound detail,
I said, "Chris do you need more paper?"
"No", he said.  "I've taught you enough for today."

This is a celebration of, and a prayer for, birds:
'Words For Birds.'



{" I am very thankful for birds.  May they not fall foul of 'chemtrails.'}
(I say that, in 13 words, and may it be so.)

True peace, and strength, is to be found
dwelling in the heart, not in the mind alone.

I give thanks, to everything,
without which, nothing would be.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~martin rainbowmaker~ Jan. 2013

Photos : Bird Photos, martin law, july 2013

art : the irish robin, martin law, january, 1983
in the private collection of Chris

artwork : digital pan play - photographic image reconstruction & definition, JAN 13 - wfp for moo

re - featuring

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Words For Birds

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A PATH EMERGING.

On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 00:36 AM, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

A PATH EMERGING.
 

Nocturnal doodling with pencil and paper. Envisioned an opening into a timeless realm. A long straight path between marker stones. Waves of ochre blond grass. A STRAIGHT PATH to ancient oak woods. A shower passes in autumn light.

From the original drawing only 7”x 5” small. Enlarged and transferred to canvas, only 10”x 14” small. Brought to life as a place to enter into imaginatively.

Photos show stages of the process but not the process itself. If it showed that, you'd see me gazing for hours over a cup of tea and that wouldn't be so exciting for you as it is for me.

Any more than you can observe grass imperceptibly growing but only notice stages of it. This glimpse occurred over a period of five days or so.

Once again, it's not 'just a painting'. Or even merely that concept 'a landscape.'

It's a playful but disciplined manifestation of imagination actualized. An artistic exploration.

Forget styles, eras, schools and movements, it's not in 'the art world', it's outside, seen from within. An inside out process.

Simply A STRAIGHT PATH to who knows where or when. A path emerging in consciousness, and no one knows where that is either. It's everywhere.

Perhaps the world is not so much a place, as a state of awareness, which is what's termed 'non local.' Art is a way of being present imaginatively, and imagination is a priceless human attribute. So this is not 'a commercial artifact,' just the fact of art.

Many people do themselves a disservice when they claim to have no imagination. How could they imagine such a thing? I bet their dreams are equally outrageously creative. It's not as if they were created by somebody else.

This is 'nature' outside the current age. Who in their natural state of being would wish to be defined by the current context of 'historical time', or any time at all?

This is the natural world in its timeless state, which is where it always is anyway.

As we also are, without the superimposition of temporal concepts of perception.

This understanding filters through the essence of each and every brush mark. It's not just that there are no signs or even a sign of telegraph poles or other infrastructure. It's that the organic flow pervading nature is not deviated from as the creative source.

If nature has an ancient look about it, it's because it 'is' ancient, sublimely so, and so is the soul and the human forms it takes on. A fact that so called 'normal perception' typically ignores.

The 'age' we are said to live in is just an optical illusion. So, to impose an arbitrary date or an era on the scene is to miss the mark entirely and not see it at all. It could just as easily be in the megalithic period. Nothing has changed but our perception of what is.

Painting is a way of saying it without words. Which, while they may describe, or even evoke, (if you speak the language), don't depict or demonstrate.

Whereas, imagination flows freely into paint substance and illuminates the land in breeze blown relief. The pictographic language of 'the way of the brush' inscribes the illuminated hieroglyphs of re-enchantment.~

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

rainbowmaker~

Art: A Straight Path, martin law, Oct 2013

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