Time to Create

Mary Oliver

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

– Mary Oliver

To write to your heart’s content….paint till you drop…play music obsessively…whichever you even have the tiniest spark to do,  just start.  We can surprise ourselves and find out things about ourselves we never realized we could do, just because we started!  – JQ

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves. […]
The world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

From “Wild Geese”;

Dream Work (1986)

Hiroyuki Hamada: Sculptor

Hiroyuki Hamada

I always get excited when I find an artist whose work I want to follow.  Hiroyuki is one of them.  Richard Gailbraith wrote an article: Japan:Creative – Introduction, on CEMENTUM in August 2012, in which he included a statement of Hiroyuki’s work.  I cannot say it better then him, that Hiroyuki’s work “oozed sci-fi whilst retaining an intrinsic ‘Japaneseness’ about it.  It connotes to me Zen gardens and the post apocalypse at the same time.”  Jeff Hamada, from Booooooom,  ‘randomly came across Hiroyuki Hamada’s work, following a link from Newstoday.’  He shares the same name but in terms of immediate family they are completely unrelated. After seeing his amazing work he thought it would be fun to contact Hiroyuki and see if he would allow him to interview him, I mean how could he say no to family?

Waters of Life

Utagawa Kuniyoshi スクナビコナ

“We can reject everything else: religion, ideology, all received wisdom. But we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion…This, then, is my true religion, my simple faith. In this sense, there is no need for temple or church, for mosque or synagogue, no need for complicated philosophy, doctrine or dogma. Our own heart, our own mind, is the temple. The doctrine is compassion. Love for others and respect for their rights and dignity, no matter who or what they are: ultimately these are all we need. So long as we practice these in our daily lives, then no matter if we are learned or unlearned, whether we believe in Buddha or God, or follow some other religion or none at all, as long as we have compassion for others and conduct ourselves with restraint out of a sense of responsibility, there is no doubt we will be happy.”

His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama (via samsaranmusing)

Happy New Year 2013!…

Jan

Jean Michel Basquiat

“I start a picture and I finish it. I don’t think about art while I work. I try to think about life.”

– Jean Michel Basquiat

Happy Birthday Mark Rothko!

Happy Birthday Mark Rothko!
September 25, 1903

“I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”

Bottom: No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Source: robertwash

Rythym From Within (photos by Michael Philip Manheim)

Michael Philip Manheim has been a professional photographer since 1969. A chance encounter with photography, at the age of 13, locked him onto a life-long pursuit. Intrigued with the themes of change and transformation, Manheim developed a signature style of layering whole phases of movement onto a single frame of film. This approach transcends a literal interpretation. He calls this series the “Rhythm from Within”.

Michael Philip Manheim’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and in Germany, Greece and Italy. His work has been featured in magazines such as Zoom (U.S. and Italy), Photographers International (Taiwan), La Fotografia (Spain), Black and White magazine, and numerous other publications. He has been Artist in Residence at Bates College in Lewiston, ME and Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH.

Manheim’s photographs are held in public and private collections, including the Library of Congress, the International Photography Hall of Fame & Museum, the Danforth Museum of Art and the Bates College Museum of Art. He has had over 15 solo exhibitions. Julian Cox, curator of photography at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, noted that Manheim’s photographs “have passion and beauty, and clearly considerable skill has gone into their execution.”

Music by Budd/Foxx, ‘Here and Now’
Thank you shivabel!

In T’ai Chi, every movement we make should be like a string of pearls…the beauty of the human form. – JQ

Grouping Prints

(Source: tamsinjohnson)

I am happy to be back to my blog (August totally disappearing due to laptop

collapse) with a new HDD up and running!

Here is a great example for hanging multiple prints/paintings. which is always a challenge.

This can very inspirational if  you are a collector of special pieces of framed art, but are in

a quandary as to how to display them tastefully.   Your collection will not look exactly like

this, but it will definitely show your own personality!  I, myself, am faced with this problem,

being one of those with an art ‘stash’ which I have recently perused!  Happy Hanging!

Calender…Alex Xie

Alex Xie
Calender. Stretch of time

I haven’t posted for an approximate month…moving into a new apartment has absorbed my time…

Used up my ‘calender’,

Put me in touch with the immediate minus cyberspace.

My work is accomplished, ying yang has come around,

And I am balanced again and glad to be back.

 

Octopus

Isoda Koryusai

Source: taosozugalactor

蛸壺やはかなき夢を夏の月
takotsubo ya hakanaki yume o natsu no tsuki

an octopus pot —
inside, a short-lived dream
under the summer moon

Matsuo Basho

 

“An octopus that has entered the pot is content with the small world of its own and enjoys a night’s dream, never suspecting that it might be pulled up in the morning. A man born into this world is like that, too, as he lives a life as brief as a dewdrop. Such a view is presented in this poem. In view of the site, there may be historical allusions, too.”  –Koseki

“Isn’t it impossible to imagine that Basho had completely entered the mind of an octopus inside the pot? He became an octopus, so to speak.”  -Watsuji

And still another interpretation:

“In the Japanese poetic tradition, those who complain of the shortness of the summer night are, above all, lovers who have to part in the morning. Basho drew upon that traditional mood of romantic love and applied it to the life of an octopus dreaming a short dream in a pot, thereby turning it into humor.”  -Yamamoto

The aforementioned haiku and commentary were
translated by Professor Emeritus Makoto Ueda.

 Note about the print:  Isoda Koryūsai (礒田湖龍斎 1735-1790^?) was a Japanese printmaker and painter active from approximately 1764 to 1788.  (via Wikipedia)

MUTANT WEEDS BY LUZINTERRUPTUS

Artist: Luzinterruptus
+ luzinterruptus.com

Mutant Weeds, the latest guerrilla lighting installation by Luzinterruptus, is a comment on environmental pollution. Instead of dimming the green illuminated signage that denotes the presence of a pharmacy, the city of Madrid allows such lights to shine more brightly, thereby ensuring that the surrounding area is bathed in a green glow. Using fluorescent sticks formed into blades of grass, Luzinterruptus planted a garden of the near future, where a new, photosensitive species grows up from the sidewalks, nourished by the lights.  – by sabine7 / April 2, 2012

I am sharing this because of this installation’s statement on environmental pollution (and the fact that I have always been obsessed with neon).  – j. quigley