Have you ever gone back, many years later, to visit a building where you once lived, or simply a place which you loved, perhaps as a child, or in your travels, only to find it has been demolished and you never knew?
Whenever you thought about it, maybe even decades after you left, it never occurred to you that maybe it no longer existed?
And people…. it’s a bit of a shock sometimes to find out, perhaps from an old friend, that someone you lost touch with over the years, maybe someone you went to school with or worked with, has been dead for many years, but if you thought of them, you imagined them going on just as they were in those days.
Such an experience really brings home the knowledge that the pictures we hold onto, in our minds, of people and places (or events) may be very much our own imagination and not fact!
From the Sunflower and Mandalas series: Sunflower, Yellow
This was the first one in a series made from photos of sunflowers, one of my favorite flowers, in the community garden, or elsewhere. This one, festooned with spiderwebs, was in the garden of friends.
Each of the series has, behind the sunflower, two circular designs reminiscent of mandalas, some religious, some cultural. The pattern on the top left is very similar to the pattern of sunflower seedheads.
This is a kind of digital “collage” of seven or more pieces, created by rubbing crayon over parts of various objects in my home, objects from my travels or family things. Each piece of paper on which a pattern appears is then saturated with water-colours around the crayon, and the whole thing assembled as a collage, sometimes physically, but in this case, digitally!
Why-why refers to Y-Y, the Ying Yang symbol in the centre! 🙂
The “mandala” of chaos and order was made long before we felt the chaotic global effects of whatever caused the Covid 19 pandemic to start.
The apparent wave of “chaos”crossing my symbol for order here (from a clay clock-face which I made in my pottery days) arose out of yet another combination of chance, real liquids and solids and finally, digital art.
The order of the universe itself, plus the order which we believe we see in it, plus chaos, chance, complexity, uncertainty, the interconnection of all things . . what we do with all that : c’est la vie!
Here’s an abstract which I originally called “Red Square.” . . . until it dawned on me that perhaps that was not a good name since it might be taken as meaning a place of that name in Russia, so then I called it “Message”. . . until it dawned on me that people might ask what the message was! And I had no message about this one ; it’s just an abstract!
No two people looking at someone or something will be seeing quite the same thing, nor all the history behind the person or object they think they are seeing.
If there’s a “message” in this, it is: “As in art, so in life.” We all look at everything through our own personal “filters”: our own darkness, light, sharpness etc, and through our own life histories.
We name what we see, sometimes automatically without thought (red square!). Sometimes our naming is learnt, sometimes we just don’t know what to call that which we see or experience. But every thing and person holds so much more than is obvious at first sight. We know that, but sometimes we forget it.
You can find more about the technique, one of my main methods, and to see what this was made from, go to Art Methods.
If you are interested in methods, you can find the photo from which this one arose, something rather surprising, by looking for it in Art Methods, by clicking the menu above the header on the Home page.
This was made from a photo of reflections on a wall. They did indeed pass, as soon as the sun moved on! When I looked at them I first thought of a group of cloaked figures walking past.
Passing: passing through Now, passing beyond the past, passing over the past, passing on… , passing over, passing for . . . So much depends on prepositions!
“To take soundings” means, amongst other things, to drop a line down into the depths, to find out what is down there, below the surface, measuring how deep down the line will go.
In these Covid times, where very little is “normal”, we have been forced, willy nilly, to take stock of our situations and face ourselves to a degree which we may have rarely had to do before. In this pandemic, with mega-uncertainty about most things, with outcomes depending on many factors beyond our control and constantly having to make choices whether to do this or that without sufficient information, we are called on to look very deeply into ourselves, to “take soundings” to find out what is really important to us and each in our own way, to find in these depths the resources to cope with it all. All this as horrors play out on the world stage.
And then there’s the lesser problems! We are learning that there is more than one way to do many things, work, shop, meet etc. Like most of us who are single and have no family in town, it’s not just that social isolation itself is a problem for me, but also the lack of connection and touch with “real”people.
Then today I remembered a poem which I used to keep pinned up on a bulletin board. The board has gone now but I still hold the poem in my heart. For when I need it!
IN ALL WEATHERS
only this is necessary in rain or sun: to follow step with step and know the ground. to reach out your hand, or touch with eyes, or with the heart. to praise, in gratitude and wonder, praise the budding, blooming, withering worlds. to see the forests and the trees to etchno lines. to weave yourself a garment or maybe even wings with all your gathered threads from questions, loves and wonderings, a garment ending in a fringe where Self or One, no question now, only depends on where and why and and how you need to look this moment. here. and in the end to sit, or lie, or walk, or stand open, breath by breath hearing the one song pulse through all the summing, sighing, shimmering, sounds. or just to be in silence and to know no whether.
This not a typical post. This time it’s not art but photographs, albeit slightly blurred, which in this case was a good thing! I had not originally intended to include straight photos in this blog. (I have another place for that), but there are a few, since one of my aims is to get people to really look at things which they might not have noticed before.
This is a closeup of part of a spider web, caught in just the right light to show a Thin Film Interference (TFI) light effect on the strands. This is what a spider web contains! Or rather, this is what your eyes may see if you are lucky enough to catch a web in front of a dark background, like the shaded woodland here, but against the light. The colours which we see are not “what is”, but rather what is produced through the combination of our eyes’ lenses, the available light, the position, the background, the materials, the distance etc.
This spiderweb effect may be due to Thin Film Interference, the same thing that produces colours in soap bubbles or films of oil or gas on a road, or it may be Diffraction. Opinions differ and the physics of it all is beyond me!
According to Wikipedia, Richard Feynman has said,
BTW, the circles in the above photo (possibly what some people call “orbs”) are likely dust particles, as they catch the light.
Something similar can also be seen sometimes on close-ups of dandelion spokes, probably not very visible in the small photo below. The iridescence of some bird’s feathers, beetles etc., is another closely connected effect. If you want to know more, check out TFI and Diffraction on the web.
