ORGANIC DETAIL. (An improvisation.)

Pondering a possible post, while wondering what words for weeks of waiting on gestation of inspiration worthy of creation. Free flow forever in flux and fluctuation, dissolution and resolution subject to witness of the world with its wars and wild ways willfully oblivious to the prevalence of pollution by toxic solution. Souls seeking to sustain spontaneous access to the source as cause for sacred celebration.

Simply to nurture the creative spark for a candle flame that dispels the dark, to light the way of an unknown track while all of creation is under attack.

In plain language, it's not just that it's exponentially a puzzle of how to conceive a new painting that's not just another replicated version in the mode of something already known, but it's equally challenging to describe in words why that seems to be so.  

Bluntly stated, it's that all that we know as life on earth is under attack from misguided misuse of advanced technology which is damaging the fundamental but unacknowledged web of life.  

The majority of people are still either complacently not aware of the already present many leveled emergency everywhere in air, water, food, and power supply, or if they are superficially aware are in denial and understandably so.  

It's too extensive a subject for me to write about adequately and is not the purpose of this post.  Besides, all relevant information is and has long been freely available and in the public domain, just needing to be assimilated if not digested, and acknowledged and shared openly rather than repressed.  

All i want to do here is make a simple, predominantly visual post for continuity. More specifically to feature and focus on a few selected photos of close-up details of brushwork in previous paintings with the emphasis on organic. Having tried in other posts to describe, perhaps unsuccessfully what the use of that word points to, it probably can't be described anyway without examples.

There is a tendency perhaps for people to take in a painting at a glance and not look deeper into richness of texture and detail where there's often a lot going on in microcosm abstractly.  Depending on how loose or free-form a painting is.  In the process itself since the attention is on the tip of the brush, you'd naturally expect that to be where spontaneous subtleties occur.  Neither contrived nor totally random but integrated organically, sometimes creating worlds within worlds.

For now, just sharing a few close up photos of portions of paintings, hoping eventually to regain some clarity on where the painting process might be going.  Being always in a mode of not knowing, since my relationship with it and what exactly wishes to express itself, being receptive, is vulnerable to what is as well as isn't going on within and around me. 

Currently heightened sensitivity to the man-made and mundane modern environment, awareness of the system and Samsara, people suffering, trends, agendas, and dramas in the world at large.

Which, seeming of late so all prevailing, continual, and extreme, as that which was
hidden is increasingly exposed, interrupts, hopefully only temporarily, the flow of creative affirmation.

Without further elaboration and to sustain a flow, like water around an obstacle or stepping stones across a torrent, bringing to completion a string of close-up images of organic detail.
Plus one more for good luck. Notice the face of the bearded Bard if you can, emerging within the mossy grain of the bark of the oak. *

   

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

 Martin Rainbowmaker. 

GAMBLE ON ROSES.

A blank canvas and a blank mind, at least that's a starting point.  Though it's usually quite a while before i proceed to the next stage. Needing an image that could embody a quality of beauty that even that word itself is too jaded by misuse to convey.

In a folder of digital photos, rambling roses in my back yard, originally a mere minimal rasp lost in long grass, and nurtured from next to nothing.  Flourishing and full flowering, blooming June after June.  Seeming suitable i chose to gamble on roses.   

Intricacies of small wildish roses in close-up, convoluted and complex to draw with accuracy. A gamble too, to position and compose with all elements in proportion, true to the photo without loss or distortion.  So the question arose, how to transpose, the photo eight and a half inches high, to canvas twenty inches high ?
I improvised a solution.

While it could be done by eye, a folded paper's edge marked to match the photo on the screen becomes a ruler.  Then folded longways on itself again and again and all divisions equalized.  Marked off as twenty equal divisions adjusted without calculation, being proportional equivalents to twenty inches, and translates to
actual inches on canvas.

Sometimes the best method may be no method at all.  In sharing, a showing is better.  Imagine describing how to tie shoelaces, we'd never get it.  The painting went through intentionally distinct stages over a period of two weeks.  All totally organic, nothing technical.  I confess to never finding it as easy as it may look, and you'd wonder why we do what we do.  Aspiring to be inspired and inspire, seems to involve method.

Preceding paragraphs relate to form and procedure.  Being just one way to form guidelines for following while also augmenting the weave of idiosyncrasies in the drawing's flow that just happen to be there unintended. Ironically impossible to describe, contrive, name, or even point to.  No surprise then, if all these words fall short, when there's no fixed target to speak of.  Jostled in a jumble that's a job to juxtapose, just to share the photo of the painting of a rose.

As with a certain specific visual characteristic of free-form flow which to the casual glance appears random and disorganized.  Whether you care to call it Tao, or naturalness, a description of which is not the phenomenon itself.  Subtlety seemingly invisible to rational sight.  Felt with the faculty with which we evoke images in the embers, creatures in the clouds, and facial features within foliage.

 Round off this ramble that arose around a gamble on a bramble.  Improvising on the most suitable image immediately at hand.  Something most structurally suited to epitomize a certain fresh, clean, and serene benevolent vibe.

Demystify and share the process in a way that may be helpful.  Using words as an aid to convey elusive but relevant known qualities in the realm of art and perception.  Ironically as always, but naturally so, there seem to be no adequately exact words to represent salient qualities so subtle as to be beyond categories of common classification.  Which may well be true of almost everything, as is often said, 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'.

To which i might alternatively add:  'The essence of art is present in heart when he 'the beholder' is absent'.  A sentence to contemplate closely.  The insight lost in the noise of a busy world, expressed as art.  ~

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

Martin Rainbowmaker.

FIELD PATTERNS. - (The painting).

A walk in the woods yielded little in the way of fresh inspirational images other than a few close-ups of dry leaves and twigs, bits of broken bark, primeval organic abstractions of crumbling fungal detritus, emblematic and evocative of arcane medieval interwoven wall hangings to ponder on. All a bit imaginatively out there and a tinge phantasmagoric, but with a complexity potentially taxing and tedious to draw for love or leaves and a white primed canvas was bored with waiting. The photo perspective at least a radical down to earth take on what we call 'the landscape'.  (Click to enlarge.)*

The inspiration situation still elusive and seeming somehow symbolic and symptomatic of the state of society and current energies at large on earth, and so, served as corrective prompting to find a lighter, more expansive and far-seeing focus of imagery to make into a painting as a conscious counterbalance of harmony of feeling in subtle ways of form and warmer colour, elevating the mood above ground level leaves.

Days later i happened to be sharing a glimpse of a recent crop circle drone footage video with a friend who was visiting. In itself an epitome of light, expansive, and far-seeing. Even then, i didn't know if or how this would give rise to a painting. Surprisingly since it did i'll take a leap forward now and show the whole painting as an instant uplift from leaves and then elaborate on how the video was a catalyst.

FIELD PATTERNS.  Acrylic on canvas. 20" by 16".

Visually, artistically, abstractly even, the pervading basic colours of ripe crop, green field patterns blending into soft blue horizon haze of far distance felt and seemed to provide a theme, and even if it's seen as a scene it's the harmonious interrelationship of shaped colour that's of the essence of whatever it may mean.

So i followed the full drone footage in flow of folds of fields unfolding.  Attentive when to pause at high points of balanced  composition.  Then with an aerial perspective zoom in to some further distant spot.

Expanding at least linearly by enlarging distant vistas.  Then, knowing nothing about screen -shots and what-not, zoomed more precisely with a camera and got a couple of clear shots directly from the screen.  One carefully measured for relative pictorial proportions and transcribed via pencil point to canvas.

If at a glance the painting might be assumed to be aspiring to be a photo, its not.  Why when you've got a photo make a fake one?  As with the leisured lilt of this literal language let alone likenesses it's the poetic juxtaposition of words for their shape, colour, sound, and flow.  With a tendency to write in the same mode that i mix colours and make images.  The poetic license of likeness is just fuel and foundation for refinement of feeling.

The largely unseen and therefore invisible part of a painting in progress is a palette.  French for any bit of old cardboard and no big deal, but what goes on there is more than a mere distracted dab of a brush.  Think alchemy, fine-tuning.  What could be a more subtle process than combining pigments and refining the ratio to the utmost degree and often at length, going there just as often as you go to the painting.

What else to say about this painting, FIELD PATTERNS?  It speaks clearly enough for itself. Took just three days to complete.  The atmospheric soft blend of detail into distance offset by large warm foreground field shapes.  Where three balls of light having laid down a crop formation lightly as any winged creature lays an egg.

  A panoramic patchwork structured like stained glass, network of field borders punctuated by dotted trees like droplets on a web, musical notes or a string of beads. A healing image with gentle touch and minimal correction but for fine-tuning the tones of the large crop fields.  Pale blue on white canvas the sky  barely touched and all unlaboured.  Just a harmonious piece of colour blending and balance with a flavour of calm lightness and peace.  *

***  ***  ***  ***

Martin Rainbowmaker.

     

SPIRAL OF LIGHT. (Photo update.)

Sharing this new photo of the painting 'Spiral of Light' because it's closer to the actual colour of the painting than the one previously published on this blog on March 13. 2017.  Especially with regard to the colour blue.

It was painted in January 2017.  The reason for the colour change was that my original photo was not in focus.  A friend called by and offered to sharpen it up using photo-shop, something i have never used as i like to keep to the actual painting which takes many hours of fine-tuning in the process of working on it to get it right.

My friend demonstrated the range of what was possible with many variations and we settled on the version previously published.  While it was crisper and an improvement in that sense, the actual colour was altered considerably, the painting itself does have more of a softness and warmth.  Even so, digital cameras do often alter the colour, depending on the light source.

  

In the meantime i let another friend use the modified image to be on the cover of a lovely set of Vedic Astrology Cards she has designed. She recently expressed a wish that it was closer to the true colour, blue especially.

So i've just taken some new and more accurate photos.  Sending them as a surprise she wasn't expecting.  Promptly realizing it would also be good to post them on the blog.  Perhaps with one or two close-ups of detail as previously.

Besides, i'm glad of a valid opportunity to show the painting again in another light.  Hopefully conveying even more of my imaginative intention of vision described in the original post, 'Spiral of Light, March 13. 2017.  ~

 ~~~  ~~~  ~~~  ~~~

 Martin Rainbowmaker.

  A BRIEF PREVIEW.

Additionally, here's a brief preview of a forthcoming post.  A most recent painting, already completed, and the stages it went through.  Titled:  Gamble On Roses.  With accompanying explanatory article.  So called due to not knowing how it would turn out.  Fortunately it worked out fine. ~

MORE 'OTHER WORK'.

Continued from another post, simply an additional selection of illustrations done for Earthwatch  an environmental organisation during 1983 to 1993.  

Without further comment i let the images speak for themselves.  i suggest enlarging them on the screen to view in detail, as the Blogger process unfortunately seems unable to accommodate them 'extra large' without a glitch of overlapping the boundary, which seems rather dysfunctional but just click on the image works even better.

       

Well there are more, as well as a lot of extremely detailed book illustrations.  I've illustrated four published books plus one of my own, the original artwork of which was ultimately stolen and never published.

However, a half dozen colour photocopies of the illustrations are all that remains of that book, so i composed an article around the gestation and saga of that work which can be found on this blog under the title 'The Gypsy Child', posted in 2013.  Type that title in the small box at top left if you're curious.

Gypsy Child is also the title of the first song i wrote in the 1960s, which you can also listen to in the music section on this blog, and which inspired the book.  This is all very retrospective i know, but i prefer to share stuff of a more intimate nature.

Hopefully a light relief from the all prevailing and ongoing horrendous karma dramas, intrigues, shocking scandals, revelations, leaks, false flags promptly discredited as hoax, mud-slingings, back-stabbings, cover-ups, unnoticed creeping genocides, and sensational fear porn surging through the internet and changing daily but remaining boringly the same, revolution without resolution.

Meanwhile a better future is forever coming soon (sooooon), or 'so on, and so on', which is why it's never present, when was a future ever present?  Time, money, and fear.  Imagine a gentler world, now there's a challenge, actually a neglected art. Imagination is in the present so it's not just imaginary.  In the imaginary future i may share twenty meticulously detailed architecturally accurate drawings of actual castles, but i've done enough for the moment, unexpectedly so, and there i was, talking about artist's block. ~  

 ~~~~   ~~~~   ~~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker

SOME OTHER WORK.

Over a period of ten years, 1983 to 1993, i regularly contributed illustrations, magazine cover drawings, posters, bumper sticker and T shirt designs etc. for Earthwatch, a local grassroots environmental organisation no longer in existence.

Few who know me or the work on this blog will be aware i've done a lifetime of other artwork besides paintings.  Sustaining the flow of the current blog posts over five years there have been quite naturally and continue to be periods of what's called 'artist's block'.  Though that's always been the case and the same applies to the writing.

While i may or may not appear to be prolific i have always been familiar with the diversity of concepts and forms of what constitutes a painting.  Yet such multifaceted possibilities regularly produce an impasse where it's not apparent how to proceed and that's an understatement.  

It just feels more amplified from a lifetime of exploring different approaches and since posting regularly online. Especially from having an overview from looking at thousands of paintings you can get the impression that everything imaginable is and has been already explored by someone somewhere.

Such infinite diversity can cause you to question the possibility of creating something that has communicable personal significance and evolving it into further areas.  The alternative seeming to be repetition with variation which obviously becomes limitation at some stage.

Even though creativity in and for itself is in no way related to competitiveness which is merely comparative, inhibiting playfulness.  Due to the commercialization of art and its competitive materialism it can seem dauntingly so.

Along with the exponential advance of sophisticated computer generated imagery and technology in all areas of life, where there is a gain there is also the possibility of an imbalance in favour of progressive dominance by artificial intelligence over all that is intrinsically sacred. A trend we are persuaded to embrace without question, in itself a cause for wise circumspection of possible motive.

A slight digression on the theme of the creative urge to flow and share encountering a paradoxical anomaly.  For now i'm posting a select few from a huge body of previous graphic work.  Just for the record here's a handful of the few drawings that remain and but for a co-worker who salvaged them long after the event i would have no record at all.  Some published book illustrations may follow.  While i puzzle over how to express in paint and colour and the conundrum of how the barely conceivable but universally longed for is quite naturally seemingly beyond the means to express.  ~        

More Earthwatch drawings continued in another post.

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

Martin Rainbowmaker