ANCIENT FUTURE

You may say it’s just a dream.

               It’s a vision i have seen,

of a world that’s new and green,

                               in the golden days.~

                                                               (A song.)

 

I’m still getting a perspective on this recent painting, Ancient Future, and the process through which it came to be.

At a casual glance it may seem light-weight and not without imperfections but as an artistic therapeutic uplift from an unbidden introspective like the need of a seed emerging from inner depths to be birthed into the light.

Even these words are a second rewrite, as the visual image urge relates to impressions so ephemeral and elusive not subject to the rules of grammar. A subterranean understatement. Probably an impulse from the earth herself.

File under the current state of humanity as one with the planet without further elaboration. Combined with the ascending awareness of previously dormant potential accessible to human imagination. Then found a video talk on the internet by Lucia Rene, titled (Ascension game changer.) With regard to being in resonance with the world’s resonance rising. Bound to be uplifting.

Creative blocks are not much fun especially if you’re not a plumber. The flow to go with was nowhere apparent but for an ancient mound in mind and vast distant vistas vibrating in waves to infinity like a far off promised land.

Key elements from a previous painting traced and placed relative to proportion and perspective without a clue or cue what the rest might do. Till a few fields miraculously modified and metamorphed and with the help of an eraser settled into the rounding curve of the land.

Visualizing spatial dimensions of air and land in proportional progressions of atmospherics of colour tone and contour. Then the ‘ring barrow’ with the mound in the middle suggested itself. Making sure the ellipse was on a lateral plane congruent with respect to perspective.

Recalling a recent morning barely on the brink of waking, as if a hypnogogic hand briefly pointed or drew the subsequent identical ellipse at that spot, and surfaced again, just when the land needed a central circle symbol focus.

Five days and nights coaxing something from nothing in particular with a method. Minutely modifying and modulating till land and sky expanded out credibly and consistently from underfoot to horizon line.

Vast grassy plains into the infinite. Down to a thin sliver of faraway forest and mysterious distant ranging hills long low and receding into pale atmospheric blue.

It’s all in the imagining, what kind of world would such an image be emanating from, what goes on there? Intuition says it’s a world where all boundaries and divisions are blended and blessed in diversity and a sublime timelessness pervades the biospheric continuum.

No past relics of metal, plastic, and concrete and all parasitic plunder ameliorated, harmonious habitations with no scars of speeding cars or geomantic aberrations but markers and signs of reverence for the land, and what’s more we’ve done it before.

The ancients way ahead of us in the imagined future where spirit entails fewer props, crutches, gadgets, institutions, regulations, but with unreserved resolutions to pollutions. Dispute resolved in community fairness and no hierarchy, punishing for profit. Mutual amends made without amendments.

Perhaps an ancient future wave is washing through this place, redefining it to a state of being, uplifting all an octave to a plateau above mundane. Integrated nurture without boundaries, food freely grown locally everywhere as you do and it does naturally everywhere there’s no shortage of soil.

Ancient Future, no sooner complete than sent out as a signal over the synthetic lighthouse like a phoenix from the ashes and the earth in abundance.

Kindness being a better bonding than money or gold, in sharing, ancient future thereby becomes a present, other than which nothing is. ~

~~~ ~~~ ~ ~~~ ~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker.

THE MIRROR POOL

The perfect man uses his mind as a mirror, it grasps nothing, it receives but does not keep. ~ Chuang Tzu.

~ ~ ~ ~

The idea of enlightenment is like the branch trying to become one with the tree. ~

On reflection, do you notice that when there’s a thought, a verbal thought, it’s like a voice within? Except it’s not a voice. A voice is sound vibrations. With a thought there’s no sound at all. Nobody else hears any sound, and when you give full attention and just listen, neither do you, so you can’t call it a voice. It’s just the ghost of a voice pretending to be you.

So if it’s not your true voice what is it? It’s just conceptualizing grammatically. Totally redundant and needless. Like looking into a mirror to see if you’re present. Framing what is already self-aware into a pattern of language identified with as yours, and seeming to define who you think you are.

Rene Descartes was a self-confessed example of this when he declared, “I think therefore i am”, which further compounded this hallucination. Strictly speaking, it would have been slightly more appropriate if he had witnessed and honestly confessed that, ‘evidently thinking thinks it’s a thinker.’

Internal verbal thinking is a kind of parasite, a compulsive self-perpetuating cycle. If thinking thinks it can’t stop thinking, then it’s assumed to be who you are. If that’s the assumption then it won’t stop, or you’d cease to be who you think you are, or so it is thought. There being no alternative one can think of.

So it’s no surprise if the idea of enlightenment holds a certain fascination as a way of having a quiet mind, or even being a better ‘i’, but an ‘i’ can’t be enlightened. ‘I’ refers to this bit here, exclusive of everything else.

The idea of separateness can never achieve wholeness because separateness is a fiction, and doesn’t do anything by itself. ‘I’ stands for isolate in more ways than one.

It’s like the branch trying to become one with the tree, the petal trying to become one with the flower. Impossible because it already is. The human trying to become one with nature or the cosmos, absurd. What a waste of natural cosmic energy.

The perfect man uses his mind as a mirror, it grasps nothing, it receives but does not keep. If that’s so then where’s the perfect man? There’s just reflection.

Yet mind has a tendency to reflect on there being a something that reflects, but that’s just language, which implies in its structure that any ‘doing’ necessitates a ‘doer.’ Whereas if you were to call it a happening, then it doesn’t have to imply that there’s a something that it’s happening to within the wholeness in quite the same way.

 

 

It depends on what is meant by the word ‘who.’ In this case a collection of memories, ideas, descriptions, and stories. Whereas what you presently are is that which can see all that as being just a limiting repeatable attempt at definition. There is no defining that, it’s not a thing.

“If mind is used to work on the mind, how then can you avoid an immense confusion”. Who said that, and what is meant by ‘who’ anyway? Talking of mirrors, if nothing can be done to avoid a hall of mirrors, and nobody there to do it, then there’s nothing that needs doing, never mind thinking about. Yet if you’ve never thought about it none of this will mean anything.

There was no verbal thinking involved in painting ‘The Mirror Pool’, Why would there be? Just direct perception, silent reflection. In fact most of what happens by itself is seemingly done simply with awareness.

Words are literally just ‘the divide and rule virus’, and you are an afterthought mistaken for a basic premise. Inner talk starts with being trained to read. Try looking at a word or a sentence and not hearing it internally.

What just happens neither requires or even uses such a linguistic phantom, and to say it’s just what’s happening tells us nothing. Just apparent movement and change rearranging itself. Refining in feeling from the simplest to the subtlest and finest nuance, integrating in the image of a mirror pool.

So never mind the words lest the words be mistaken for the mind, which remains forever unknowable. No mind in things and no things in mind, both of which are only concepts. What’s true is beauty when there’s nothing else in the way. But who am i to talk? Just reflecting. ~

~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker.

BANISHING GOLD

Metamorphosis and the creative process. I had a notion to paint something different from the usual, as always. You never know where it might go when you step off a familiar path and deviate from previous patterns.

 

As often happens, the way becomes a convoluted detour through bog and tangled brambles, sniffing out where the forward path lies, or even encountering a vantage point to get a better picture, so to speak.

But after all, it’s just painting and no painting ever stopped a war, but just as with anything you invest a lot of energy in, painting is not always just a walk in the woods.

The original idea was to improvise a free-form experiment incorporating some familiar symbolic and universally archetypal shapes i’ve felt a resonance with most of my life and often explored. Basic shapes embedded in the human psyche, in use for perhaps millions of years to the present day and even appearing in crop circles.

Doodling as a way to gain access to the process and how to approach it so it would flow and transform, i got the message that this wasn’t the moment for it and some other experiment was appropriate. So wrote a page of reminders evolving out of another recent method.

Best described in concise language, i coated a canvas with thick layers of Gesso primer, carefully pressing tracing paper on to it. Then slowly peeling it off downwards. Clear acetate is more effective having more spring and suction as it’s released.

The result may be surprising, or it may not, as it involves what we call chance. As you may find, ‘in relief’ (pun intended and relevant) intricate organic forms of rocks and trees, or you may not.

If done mindfully you will at least have an overall raised network of organic texture which would otherwise be hard to reproduce. One in which you may recognize whatever you choose to discern as relevant images.

When it was thoroughly dry i tentatively shaded the surface with black oil pastel. In the same way you’d take a rubbing of a coin with pencil and thin paper. As it happened, there was a complete landscape with rocks and trees. I took a photo of a detail which shows this quite clearly.

Enhancing with black line the portions to emerge, and/or adding colour in the process. Throughout and for the most part i stayed with the pattern already there. Not adding or subtracting till it later became necessary to modify anomalies.

Hours of work, three distinct sessions approximately eight or more hours in duration. Simultaneously thinking about ‘the Golden Age’, and for years visualized and wondered how to paint it.

Having imagined such, looked at art depictions, and researched the Vedic ‘Yugas’, the long expanses of cyclic time through Iron, to Bronze, to Silver, and back to Gold. Eternally wondering why be born in the latter cusp of the Age of Kali, of iron, wars of destruction etc. Not yet returned to our full spiritual potential, yet paradoxically a period conducive to rapid individual spiritual growth.

Meanwhile the painting was beginning to look so much like an ancient embossed plaque that, somewhat out of artistic curiosity i made a spontaneous if rather bold move. I gave the whole thing a thin wash of gold.

While fully aware that the relief image could still be revealed, further hours of contemplation, attempts at manipulation, soon revealed this wasn’t such a wise move. Gold doesn’t sit well in a three dimensional landscape. It leaps out of context according to angle of vision. I considered various possibilities for a while but realized i had set myself a big problem.

Gold paint is very hard to obliterate. Even layers of matt varnish won’t do it. In other situations it did seem to neutralize the shine of metallic colour.

So i painted out the whole sky, as well as the forest, with white Gesso primer. When dry, mixed a new colour tone for the forest, and when that was dry, went over it with the black oil pastel to reveal the original network intact.

Laborious enough even to describe in plain language. A labour of love to revive, rescue, and return to the path. Metamorphosis indeed. Modifying piecemeal, touching out and banishing the last of the shiny bits.

Simultaneously enriching, enhancing, details in the mode of feeling. Typically returned five times in succession after packing away, brushes, paints, etc. thinking it was completed. Obsessive compulsion? Call it immersion, that’s what it takes. Don’t believe any of the negative terms ‘they’ continually invent for anything creative so you’ll buy their pills and give up altogether.

Whatever, and so much for gold. I resolved the equation, steered it back to the path set by chance. Returned colour range to a semblance of muted Celtic earth tones despite foreboding storm clouds in the Age of Kali.

Besides, i returned the land to the correct use of gold without domination, metaphorically of course. Learned how to proceed by going astray and finding a way. I’ll do something different next time. Despite its seeming roughness at first glance, the painting expresses a trace of where i went, to attain to A VANTAGE POINT, and that’s its title. Thirteen letters of course. ~

~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker.

NEOLITHIC GAIA

What is it that makes a doodle become art, and how do you discern the difference? Can a much used image become an icon, and what turns a basic idea into an authentic expression?


 

 

The only way to answer that, is to experiment with it. Combining a paradoxical blend of spontaneous play with critical discernment, without the one inhibiting the other. It’s amazing how much preliminary calculation it takes to establish the foundation of where you want it to go, and even so, you can never be certain it will.

The more so since neither doodling nor art have the aim of being primarily rational or conforming to consensus or normal reality. Though, except by definition, when was consensus reality ever normal, as we seem to pretend?

Creativity can be imaginative and even innovative, and preferably not beyond our ability to influence its unfoldment in some way, consciously or otherwise, according to the original impulse or intent. Such freedom of play involves discipline, while simultaneously allowing what we tend to call chance.

So imagine when, as is often the case, that you initiate a process and find you’ve set yourself a puzzle as to how to resolve it to satisfaction and if it’s even possible. Play, whether in art or sport or anything else can seem as serious as we care to imagine it to be, and we have a tendency to engage in that game.

 

As if human activity as a whole consists in inviting exponentially ever more seemingly insoluble problems in order to grow out of having to do so. Compared to the infinitely perpetual folly of needless self-genocide and rampant environmental degradation, this tiny painting is but a momentary microscopic echo.

Whether potentially iconic or ironic, the genesis of this image comes out of musing on the possible alternatives to what we call ‘the human condition’.

Imagining an eternal fleeting moment in the Neolithic era, which when conceived with benevolent compassion probably wasn’t as ‘primitive’ as we’re persuaded to think. Having positive attributes we could naturally in retrospect lament the loss of. Since we seem to create bigger and not necessarily better problems, when you’d think the wisest way to solve all problems is by not creating them.

I spent a few hours carefully constructing and recreating this composition from an enlarged portion of a previous version called ‘Below the Mound’. There really are hills in Ireland, and elsewhere, shaped like this, naturally revered in honour of the Goddess Earth.

Here envisioned as if from a peaceful moment along the riverbank, on the way perhaps to visit neighbours. In Spring- time beyond memory and outside time. An imagined but certainly actual image as intimate antidote to all the predictable narratives of nothing but barbaric battles and struggles for survival so myopically presented as ‘history’. When it’s really been a long cyclic circular devolution from a forgotten and much higher state.

 

Seriously, and with not a shred of cynicism, who are we to talk of barbaric or civilized? Being totally enslaved to the artificial, and forgetting, disdaining, degrading the natural for the illusion of money. Resigned to as being the universal norm, even the inborn gift of imagination is lost.

Humans have been around for millions of years apparently, through many cycles of evolution and devolution. Solid evidence exists all around the planet, more often than not, intentionally concealed or confiscated, though currently being revealed.

In passing i recommend listening to presentations online by Claus Dona, as well as the series of videos on New Earth channel. As evidence that our history as taught is a lie. A lie being the consistent and deliberate concealment and falsification of what is self-evidently so.

A big subject, so rather than waste words in rant or lament, it’s something i find more harmoniously expressed in paint. The current approach shared here having nothing to do with art movements or styles in particular. Just the present play of imagination. An improvised process simultaneously healing the unacknowledged universally parasitic virus called ‘difference divides’. Difference arises mutually, obviously. Long live diversity.

 

This stark black web of defining contour lines. Three whole afternoons, evenings and through the night. Quietly infusing life and organic richness into the spaces of white. Modifying in fine-tuned detail till it was right. Integrating stitch by stitch like a tapestry, a unified whole. If it looks primitive and old, it is. Full of light and life. ~

~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker.

THE WAY OF WATER

If you must worship something, how about water? But don’t put it on a pedestal, it’ll just run off. ~

~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~

We are one-with a water planet and water is the boss. Not that it has the slightest intention of being so, rather it supports all things. Therefore worthy of greatest reverence.

Being memory incarnate, water embodies wisdom of experience and demonstrates naturally that when you’re on top, your downfall follows as the natural order of things. Just ask any waterfall or dead tyrant and you’ll get corroboration that transcends words.

As Niagara falls knowing no resistance, surrendered solely to gravity and its own nature, manifesting immense power effortlessly. Solace for the lowly, the safest place is below, from where life springs and on which all edifices depend for their existence.

The solution to the illusion of being a body foreign to the planet, is water. Both human and planetary body alike are composed of 65 to 71 percent water, the sacred living element of memory, wisdom, and feeling.

Water is liquid life. We are born from uterine water, we drink water to sustain and remain alive, we depend on water to grow food, as well as to prepare it. Our body too is a planetary body, sustaining within the body of the earth with her voluminous body of water.

Yet we forget, and let those who feel foreign to the source of all life, pollute the land, the sea, the rivers, the air and ourselves, as one-with water in common, flowing within and through all.

Blinded by, and under what spell, aiding and abetting, who can tell, what kind of creature poisons its own well? Or, since profit is the illusion, poisoning the wellbeing of the whole. The sanctity of the source itself. Such a one should take a water course.

So, with deep gravity of intent, and beyond mere lame lament, i concentrate this force, being as one-with the source, and never was apart, invoking it through art.

As is now known, the voice, in sound syllables of choice, resonates the solution, heals water of pollution.

Spoken from the heart, and crystalized as art, i do dispel the spell, decree the water well. So saying, hear the sound, fierce gale blows all around. Intent sent in the aether, an answer in the weather, we heal the whole together.

It really is some storm, heard inside where it’s warm, but this is no mere prayer, rains arrows through the air, roaring round the roof, blows flames within the hearth.

It’s just a way to start, when needing inspiration, a warm-up to the art, of improvised creation. From searching for a clue, to knowing what to do, and follow where it goes, the way that water flows.

~~~ ~~~ ~ ~~~ ~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker.

RAINBOW FIELDS.

Coincidences of rainbow signals and synchronicity. Rounding bracken brown bends of backroads in quiet late December, to cottage kitchen candles and a seasonal meal. Bare branch hedgerows flash past, talking of earth tone textures and topography.

”The land on the left always reminds me of your paintings.” Fleeting impressions of folds of fields smooth down to dense branchy thicket where water runs in a gully and all burnished and bushy as a nest of foxes.

Where the seed of a spark launches a surge of fractal trains of imagery and imagination, culminating and coalescing into meticulously manifested icons of intrinsic integration, yet who hears or heeds such subliminal seeds of harmony?

Kind shots of the spot taken, attached and sent, furthering fractals in microcosm and on turning to return, a rainbow, food for focus in folds of fields. So square the rectangle and sketch from the screen, long calm gazing into the scene.

 

Tentatively at first with a soft pencil, ticking and checking where the shapes go. Then bolder in black and with a matchstick making marks in the primer. Though works best to lay texture first, so when it’s bare bone bumpy and dry, drawing comes out like a brass rubbing.

Then lines become unintended tones when coated with varnish, the brush retains a residue of stain but neatly adapted serves to clothe forms in volume and shadow, tones of dark adding density within contours.

 

Dried by the fire, clothing the weave with colour, learning through layers of green a new mix of pigment. Illuminating hillside enclosures lighter than the slate grey sky. Delving in the substance and energy of veils of ancient green like a mantle.

While the bronzed thicket could still evolve through rain-darkened brown, though there’s always a stage or a stroke you could imagine modifying. Then promptly painted in the prepared rainbow arc.

 

Still thinking in the abstract like a soft patchwork or tapestry woven with dark thread and ancient harmonies. Textures in the flowing carpet of earth, pristine, primeval, and emblematic.

Just as when we form pictures in the flow of cloud shapes, emergent images of places and faces in the fire, follow that faculty. The hide and seek of forms within forms, forming features for further enhancement.

It’s one thing seeing a face never mind a race on the moon, or mechanical artifacts behind every rock on Mars, but reading images credibly into random is an art.

One where you’re aware of salient features but also see how you see what you conceive of. Change the picture by what sort of dots you join and the image conforms to the concept and so with the status quo.

Long looking meditation from along the shores of an impression, arrive at a landing stage where the tapestry all ties up, the patchwork pitch-perfect and the works on display are the jewels of play, so worth more than one might have to work for.

 

Maintenance of innocence and antidote to angst, co-creating fruitful fractals one with the biosphere. Authentic evocation sends an emanation, augmenting intent like a meme or mantra. Despite dark skies a bright arc of prismatic spectral rain. Immersion in the subtle transformation of an impression, unfolding in a fertile field of vision. ~

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker.

RAMBLE WITH OAK

I was what’s called, ‘waiting’. That is, just being, passionately but patiently impatient for inspiration and how to tie certain things together.

When the non-verbal insight arose by itself: ‘A rope is a flexible continuity which can be used for forward progress (leading, lifting, pulling, climbing,) or, contrarily, to bind something in place preventing progress.’

Not only that. When a rope turns on itself (enough to throw anything for a loop) yet insists on going through with it with forward intent, it meets a snag called appropriately ‘a knot’, which already sounds like a negation of progress.

If it does it again it’s in a double bind, which is fine if the intention is to bind. We’ve all tied our shoelaces enough times to not even have to think about it. But with inspiration, having been there enough times to train myself to be passionately dispassionate about seeming to be at the end of my rope, yet not making it a tug of war.

Better to pause, and neither push nor pull on the delusory conflict between complimentary poles, and not settle for another double bind. The battle of black and white and other silly loop-tapes.

To not turn on yourself as if you were a worm, sending you for a loop, yet still persisting no matter how patiently impatient, such being the nature of waiting. Whatever about religion, from the Latin ‘religare’ meaning, ‘to bind back’, which doesn’t sound very liberating and which may or may not have been its original intention.

Better still the unravelling, a mini- revelation. Trace back, revealing what you did, but without turning on yourself a second time, and with no loss of passion to heal the ‘not-happening’, simply un-do, comprehending the process inwardly.

Conscientious compulsion to self-forgive, may also still mask a ‘turning on yourself’, until it doesn’t. A snag is only a not-happening till it’s unravelled. We grow by correcting mis-takes, which otherwise plummet to the pole we call evil when we refuse to see and instead, justify and persist. We’ve all untied our shoelaces enough times.

Persisting without deviation is what may be called a straight line, and we are culturally coerced to deify straight lines. Which, as we were told, are the shortest distance between two points. Which may be so as the crow flies or on paper, or driving across flat terrain. But in a wiggly world such conclusions are questionable. You could fall asleep from monotony, run out of fuel, or die of thirst.

Besides, all answers are questionable. Being conclusions (endings) they put an end to further enquiry free of already biased assumption. In looking for answers and building a life on them, we might well have continued to evolve further by forming and refining more intelligent questions.

Why settle for answers when you can ask questions? Belief is ‘choosing to assume’, it’s not-knowing. Another knot. Only when you know you don’t know will you attempt to learn and grow.

Not to mention corners, which are the inevitable result of straight lines. Most of the self-evidently alien intrusion in the natural world is the insistence on straight lines, roads, buildings, weapons, the ‘cornerstone’ of which, being ‘economics’: All ‘nomics’ with no regard for ‘eco-systems’.

Corners are a binary system, alien to our essence as one-with wiggly nature, and nature abhors a ninety degree angle. Corners conveniently replicate as grids, a superimposition of cages within cages of blocked negative energy. Grids are graphs to control and inhibit free flow of natural energy. Alien to nature and taken for granted. Imagine straight intestines, you’d really be in the... system where you’re blocked at every turn.

To return to wiggly lines in lieu of inspiration, and my previous painting PRESENCE OF OAK. A friend suggested that a version with black lines instead of brown would work well, as with recent works, and i noted that could well be so.

Curiosity and desire to paint prompted me to transform the existing painting rather than repeat the process. Possibly enhance, evolve, and enrich it in doing so. Sometimes you can take things further when you have something already formed to work with.

So i decided to see if it felt right. A relatively minor challenge for sure but one that suits my style, and after it ‘not working’ for quite a while, i was ultimately far from being disappointed.

Having for a lifetime explored many inner avenues away from early revelations related to a certain subtle integration of form-enhancing black incisive line. With intent not to emphasize boundaries knowing none exist.

Yet, paradoxically, in delicately daring to define form, it is demonstrated that ‘difference is what everything has in common’, hence the richness revealed. The original revelations of which as i well recall prompted me to sing in appreciation.

After all, who owns your garden fence, you or your neighbour? Or if you take sides, is the bulk of it then shared? Or, if you must have definitive answers to such knotty questions as, “how is everything one while apparently separate?” Which qualifies as “a good question.” Then frame it like this: “Distinctness is the surest sign of underlying unity.” Relationally speaking. Everything is a network of distinct interrelationships.

As in art, so with everything, and that’s saying a lot. The part is not apart from the whole. Wholes don’t have separate parts that’s why they’re whole. They only seem to when we distinguish distinctions, needing to draw a line somewhere between the loved and the not loved.

The oaks return, along with vision, and every-thing is recreated new as it ever was, one-with a wild and wiggly world, and today is Winter Solstice. Silently celebrating the cyclic return of solar self-same celestial light. *

*** *** *** ***

Martin Rainbowmaker.

A SHAFT OF LIGHT

Recalling a quiet walk in the woods. Returning to revise and totally rewrite, after wandering way off topic and into subsequent unfoldings. In a complex world simplicity is a rare gem. So to resume the thread of inspiration for this painting, already titled ‘A Shaft of Light.’

Autumn sunlight streaming through, down a steep incline, moving among prickly underbrush, layers of illuminated leaves below silent sleeping trees. To pause on a single weighted footfall- crunch of brittle dry detritus. An unseen creature one with the woods. ~

Breaking the surface of sleep, escaping with a sudden gut-deep abandoned and inconsolable whimper, from some tragic sad and soulful dream. What a way to wake to wonder why and what in the world it may mean.

So arise and sit awhile in quiet, with warm cupped comfort of tea before more rest. After a whole night’s study and three hours sleep. Pale peach tints of blue-grey damp dawn before bird chirp, mountains still veiled in grey across the bay. The inner child awaits the returning wise warrior within.

Still unaware the dream had coincided with widespread floods throughout the land, leaving many abandoned without home, echoes of the waking whimper from the dream and images related.

Waiting watchful, listening inwardly for the sign, to resume the task in hand. The painting, the first stage completed to satisfaction almost a month ago. Still on pause, having subtle qualities easily spoiled by haste. With art, it serves no purpose to push the river, but go with nature’s flow.

So when the natural light is right, to illuminate, and not obliterate these intricate textures that arrived, since they’re uncontrived. A specific and precise process currently evolving, involving tactile textures.

Which, when you really focus, with soft sustained attention, deep magnification, you find there’s worlds in there, and diversified dimensions. In visionary relief as glimpsed archaic hieroglyphics revealed in the light of day, which never went away.

To see, you must sustain and not just glance off. It’s no mere insincere effect. Feel lovingly through the eyes and join the dots. Undistracted by all passing thoughts. Inner tension is inattention, beauty, the present absence of beholder.

I will have to take a gentle tentative approach. The black can blur and smudge when touched by water, that’s because it’s crayon and not paint, as when you take a rubbing from a coin.

But i took a very subtle chance, sealed it first all over with matt varnish. First attempt showed even that would smudge. So retouched with white and chose the softest brush, a Chinese bamboo one with hair that caused no friction, and softly sealed with no smudge anywhere. Even so must still proceed with care.

For now, i’ll sleep on it. Then create a sacred space, with reverence for refinement of ancient Chinese art, where minimal soft colour is subordinate to form and line, and disregarding time, find quiet joy in the process.

Since we’ve lost the plot,

then why not stop the fight?

So many see neither wood nor trees.

Oh look, a shaft of light!

=== === = === ===

Martin Rainbow-maker.

A Shaft of Light - Nov 15 
           Martin Law