the awakened eye

one is the vast space itself

Posted on July 25, 2018 by miriam louisa simons

Photograph by Jerry Katz

If, in any painting or photograph, a person is depicted as very small within a wide space of nature, there is a possibility that the viewer will recognize that small form as one’s self and that this self is not separate from the vast space.

That is to say, such a picture may inspire the realization that one is the vast space itself.

When it is recognized that the vast space contains the form and that one is both the vast space and the form — at the same time — this is a realization of nonduality.

– Jerry Katz

Reblogged from Jerry Katz’s treasure trove of nondual expression:

nonduality.org

Jerry, whose contributions to this site go back to its launch in 2007, has agreed to pen a guest post in the near future. This is something to look forward to!

In the meantime, have a look at these pages:

what is this nonduality?

a parade of nondual perspectives

the devotional act of sustained observation

Posted on May 28, 2018 by miriam louisa simons

For many artists, a passion to record a selected natural object – how it moves, or is moved by, light and circumstances – and to do so repeatedly, forms the substance of their practice. Consider Georgia O’Keeffe‘s flowers: “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment.” Claude Monet painted water lilies, haystacks and cathedral facades over and over, always looking deeper and seeing more profoundly. And how many times did Paul Cézanne return to paint his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire? The high priestess of education in the creative arts, Corita Kent, would instruct her students to “Look at things until identity, value and description dissolve.”
This is my idea of devotion.

As I pondered this post introducing the work of Scott Morgan and his page at the artisans’ gallery, I was almost overwhelmed. Scott’s creative output is enormous, and it covers all manner of activity; he’s a creative director, designer, artist, writer, poet, photographer and film maker… What to choose as a sampler of his work? To my mind however, the thread that runs through all his projects – in addition to exquisitely clean, fresh design – is a sense of quiet awe and devotion. I finally decided to share photographic images he gathered by standing in the same place and simply recording what was showing up in that moment – and doing it again and again. Just like O’Keeffe, Monet and Cézanne.

Scott Morgan, One Hundred Days

Scott calls this project One Hundred Days and writes:

The basic premise of the project was simple: Photograph the exact same image; same spot, same angle, same camera, same lens, same proportion of water and sky, for one hundred days. Positioned on a hilltop 800 ft. above the water, facing due south, without the familiar sunrise or sunset poetry of east and west, create a series of images that record the elegant yet minimal transformation of the threshold between two worlds, sea and sky, and the focused ritual of doing it one hundred times over a two year period.

After being landlocked for almost seven years in New Mexico and Toronto, the One Hundred Days project was conceived as a process of my being reacquainted with the vast presence of the Pacific ocean and a return to the fundamental practice of seeing; slow down and be present. Document the process.

The images purposely contain no reference points. The elevated vantage point removes the waves and sand leaving the surface of the sea, which could be any large body of water. This strips the images of the specifics of place and sets them free to engage the viewer on many levels both real and imagined.

Scott Morgan, One Hundred Days

You can see more works from this series here.

At the artisans’ gallery: Scott Morgan – from silence to symphony

Images and quoted text copyright Scott Morgan.

websites:
scottmorganart.com
scottmorganstudio.com
thissimplegrace.com

on losing the plot and regaining the world of the holy fool

Posted on February 21, 2018 by miriam louisa simons

Michael Leunig is a much-loved Australian cartoonist, writer, painter, philosopher and poet whose newspaper work appears regularly in the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. He describes his approach as regressive, humorous, messy, mystical, primal and vaudevillian – producing work which is open to many interpretations and has been widely adapted in education, music, theatre, psychotherapy and spiritual life.

His commentary on political, cultural and emotional life spans more than forty years and has often explored the idea of an innocent and sacred personal world. The fragile ecosystem of human nature and its relationship to the wider natural world is a related and recurrent theme.

‘Leunig’ is a household word here in Australia. Who else consistently reminds us of our collective and individual vulnerabitlties? Our defences, needs and neediness? Who else – like an innocent wide-eyed kid – points out the elephants in the room and the unclothed emperors?

In total disregard of the snobbery around “content” in contemporary art, Leunig sows his seeds of simple sanity in the intimate space where the artist and viewer meet. He speaks in language we can understand, and as we listen to him – immersed in a mix or humour, poignancy and delight – our own wee holy fool smiles and skips about.

To my great delight Michael has given ‘the awakened eye’ permission to share one of his pieces of verbal artistry, an essay titled Regressive Painting and the Holy Fool. In this work he covers much territory relevant to the theme of this site and of importance to all who take their playful creativity seriously: What is genuine creativity and what blocks it? Where has our authenticity gone? What is the relationship between the ego and the holy fool? How can we find our way back to the world of our holy fool? Why does it matter?

As an introduction to the illustrated essay – which has its own page here – this post offers a few quotes. It’s a teaser – read the whole piece and be reminded of what you know so well.

It is a way of painting.
It is a way of living.
It is a way of transcending the banal inhibited self and finding the divine.
It is a struggling downward journey – this stumbling, daring and devout pilgrimage back to mature innocence and raw beauty; to the sublime joy and the natural intelligence and wisdom of the holy fool.

Michael Leunig - The Holy Fool

… there is surely a measure of the holy fool in all of us. What adult has not been a delightful or shocking little holy fool in childhood: the primal young creature who reached out innocently for what was forbidden, or sincerely said out loud a simple embarrassing truth? ‘The emperor has no clothes’ cries the wee holy fool. And who did not draw and paint in beautiful peculiar ways, or cry and sing freely for a short early chapter of wide-eyed creative life before the ways of the world began to impinge and inhibit? Who has not known a time of free flowing reverie and wonder in the rich solitude and sanctuary of early consciousness? Whose outlook and imagination has not been indelibly adorned by the daydreams and visions of childhood?

The dire pursuit of creativity in affluent societies is to a considerable extent driven by egotistical art ambition, but underlying this drive may be an intuitive attempt to recover the capacity for wonder, spontaneity, playfulness, openness, mindfulness and access to raw beauty; the qualities that were so natural and easy in childhood; a search for connection to one’s lost little fool – who is indeed the archetypal personification of creativity’s wellspring.

The artist needs to know how to lose the plot
– how to not care and how to not know –
and how to actually enjoy that freedom
and understand what a blessed revitalizing state all of that mess can be.

Michael Leunig - The Holy Fool

The most joyous painting is not done for the art world, it is done for the inner world; it is a self delighting other-worldly thing – a getting lost in regression and solitude; a sub-literate, semi-delirious way to be with the spirited little fool in the depths of one’s being for a while – there to invent one’s art freely, and there to find enchantment, infinite surprise and the bright wondrous question ‘What is this?’

~ Michael Leunig

http://www.leunig.com.au

Michael Leunig Appreciation Page on Facebook

regressive painting and the holy fool

Indra’s net: a digital dance with virtual light-physics

Posted on December 6, 2017December 7, 2022 by miriam louisa simons

Paul Mulliner is a first. He introduces digital graphics to our artisans’ gallery and eloquently explains both his reasons for choosing this medium and the view he loves to explore. And what a view it is – nothing less than the dance of the universe, the “cosmic consciousness-field.”

I asked Paul to contribute a few words about his digital art practice for this post. At his page in the gallery you’ll find more examples of his artwork and a sample of his writing about consciousness.

$Paul Mulliner - digital refraction image$

3D computer graphics software can simulate the physics of real-world light as it refracts within and reflects around the assembled objects or ‘models’ you place in the virtual 3D space provided to you by the software.

This capability of 3D graphics software offers the possibility of working with refractions and reflections to create digital art images.

For the refraction-image shown, an underlying graphic field of connected elements is expressing an intuited non-local connectedness and fractal self-similarity at all scales within the cosmic consciousness-field.

This underlying field is refracted through various transparent foreground shapes, which hint at quantum-scale dynamic process-structures such as the spin-resonance field-fluctuations known as sub-atomic ‘particles’, atoms and molecules.

Perhaps there’s also an expression here of the way that the underlying cosmic field of consciousness emerges into our world through the particular lens or prism of our awareness.

Part of the pleasure of working with virtual light-physics to create images is that the interaction of transparent 3D models with an underlying, structured graphic field often generates unstructured and unexpected refractions.

It’s fun to play with moving objects and lights around each other, to see how they interact and create refractions and reflections.

Paul Mulliner - still frame from digital animation sequence

I’m also working on an animation sequence which generates changing reflections as various mirrored objects move around each other.

It’s possible to create a 3D array or matrix of mirrored spheres, in which each sphere in the array reflects every other sphere in the array.

Any change of colour or size of any one of the spheres is immediately apparent on the surface of every sphere in the whole array.

This is a clear expression of the apparent non-locality of the consciousness field, in which anything known locally is also known immediately throughout the whole field.

An array of mirrored spheres has obvious similarities to the ancient Buddhist metaphor known as Indra’s Net, which describes the interconnectedness of the Universe as being like an infinite array of jewels, each one of which contains an image of all other jewels in its surface.

Like a non-local, dynamic-hologram, with fractal self-similarity at all scales, every part of the whole field continuously adjusts to changes in every other part of the field.

An intelligent, dynamic interconnectedness, orchestrates and binds together all of what we know as reality everywhere.

Each one of us is entirely connected into and known within the whole Universe.

– Paul Mulliner

at the artisans’ gallery

website

Note:
The 3D digital modelling and animation software required to create digital art used to be rather expensive. However, with the emergence of Blender, which is open source software and therefore free to download, this is no longer the case. The images featured here were created with Blender 2.78 or 2.79.
https://www.blender.org/

when we talk of art we need to talk of love

Posted on September 3, 2017 by miriam louisa simons

Awakening the eye is admitting the love and enquiry into self
to guide us back to harmony.
– Rashid Maxwell

Rashid Maxwell embodies my idea of a Renaissance man. His profile reads like a prompt for a writers’ course where the task is to create a character both credible and unlikely. (There are many threads that run parallel to my own – perhaps that’s why I relate so keenly to the way his life has unfolded.) He was never a candidate for the typical, mundane and mediocre, but followed his innate thirst for truth – the truth of life and the truth of his wide-ranging creativity.

He is a published writer and poet as well as an exhibiting artist, art lecturer and pioneer in the field of art as therapy. He not only designs furniture, but also meditation spaces and eco-environmental projects – including a park, a reafforestation venture, a wetland bird sanctuary and a nature reserve. Having lived and worked in many countries he now resides in rural Devon, England, where he practices organic gardening, keeps bees, continues to draw and paint, and to walk – as he puts it – “the pathless path of inner exploration.”

For the artisans’ gallery, Rashid has contributed a selection of watercolour paintings inspired by the Love that flows beneath our everyday passions – Paramananda, the bliss beyond bliss.

Rashid Maxwell - Paramananda series

I call this series of watercolour paintings Paramananda. They have been prompted by expressions of this love that I observed in people who have meditation in their lives. Sometimes they are dancing, sometimes sitting silently, sometimes passing through grave illness and sometimes waiting for their lover. If these images transmit to you a figment of that underlying love, love has done its work.
– Rashid Maxwell

Continue reading at Rashid Maxwell’s page.

artisans

artisans’ gallery