Category: MISCELLANEOUS

The Wings of the Morning

The Wings of the Morning. From Psalm 139 ( Acrylic Collage)

“Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit?
Or wither shall I flee from Thy Presence?
If I take the WINGS of the MORNING
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea
Even there shall Thy hand lead me
And Thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say surely the darkness shall cover me
Then the night shall be light about me.”

– – – –

A personal diety, whom one would address as Thou, is not part of my spiritual imagination, yet some of the Psalms resonate with me, as do these (selected) lines from Psalm 139. They also remind me of the second and last verses of an old-favorite poem, by Yeats:

The LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE
-William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer. and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

– – – – –

Sometimes when anxiety, or fear these Covid days, threaten to take over, I can reach down to “my deep heart’s core” and know that I do have some peace there, even if sometimes, “peace comes dropping slow” ! And even in “the uttermost parts of the sea” with darkness covering me, I will have some Light there, and Peace there, in my deep heart’s core, by whatever name one wishes to call it.

To anyone who has to fly to the uttermost parts, through illness or other circumstances: may you be blessed with Peace.

Sunflower and mandalas


From the Sunflower series: Blue Sunflower.

This is part of a small series of sunflower pictures made from photos of sunflowers, mostly in the community garden where I had a plot. Sunflowers are one of my favorite plants and the seedhead in the centre (one of nature’s patterns) viewed together with the surrounding petals, makes something like a mandala.

At the back of each sunflower in the series are two circles containing cultural, religious or universal circular patterns, in this case a star and a maze.

In remembrance of places which no longer exist

In remembrance of places which no longer exist.

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!

More about the method in Art Methods, zoom down to this picture.

Sunflower, yellow

From the Sunflower series : Sunflower , yellow.

This was the first of a series which I made from photos of sunflowers, one of my favorite flowers. 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.

Why-Why

Why-why

This is a kind of digital “collage” of seven or more pieces, created by rubbing crayons 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! 🙂

At the edge of the woods

The Tree at the Edge of the Woods

The edge of the woods… Did you think that meant looking in to the woods, or looking out towards the town from inside the woods !

SOME QUOTES ABOUT EDGES:
When you walk to the edge of all the light you have
and you take the first step into the darkness of the unknown,
you must believe that one of two things will happen:
There will be something solid for you to stand upon
or you will be taught to fly.
-Patrick Overton

“Life” is a concept, like the Universe, that expands as soon as we reach what we think is the edge. – Kamand Kojuri

Sooner or later, we will come to the edge of all that we can control and find life waiting there for us . – Rachel Naomi Remen

for more on art method

Through a blind, light-ly

Through a blind – light-ly.

This is a picture probably best left undescribed, but if you do want an explanation . . . read on!

It shows a view of trees through one of those long roll-up patio blinds . Actually, there is a view of trees through that blind, but it’s not those particular trees. They are somewhere else! This is a composition using two different photos. The colours of the top one, the blind, are intensified.

Sometimes our distant memory actually does confuse or put together two different events!

Everything that we see, that we experience, is seen through filters of one sort or another: the amount of light (physical or mental) which we can shed upon it; our own personal and cultural history and our memory. Of course, generally speaking, we have to proceed, day by day, taking things as they appear to be but it is good to remember that whatever we see, it is always from a certain angle, from one physical, emotional or mental point-of-view, at a particular degree of magnification!

Just bend, just stretch!

Just Bend, Just Stretch

This one is to emphasize the importance of exercising!

If you’d like a smile, here’s the photo from which this picture was made.

Believe it or not, the inspiration was my lunch after coming home from an exercise class : a bowl of carrot soup on a pottery dish. A lot of twisting and turning and adding in Photoshop Elements . . . and Just Bend arrived. That’s how far my artwork gets from the original photos!

Covid Time : Three versions!

ORIGINAL PICTURE, representing Normal Time, pre-Covid

_______________________________________________

Covid-Time 1 : Time Stretched!

Covid-Time 2 : Time Shrunk!

One of the odd things about this Covid time is that for me, and for many people it seems, time itself appears to either speed up or to crawl! It’s hard to believe it will soon be Summer when I have hardly become used to the idea that it is Spring … and what happened to Winter? Some days I can’t believe it when I see that it is only 3:00 PM when I thought it must be at least 6:00 PM; other times, the days speed by faster than ever and there isn’t time to do all the things I meant to. And it always seems to be the weekend again every few days! Strange.

So I thought I’d have a bit of fun and try to depict that visually.

At the top, is a picture which might represent a chunk of normal Time, with all its ups and downs, ins and outs, lights and darks. (Dont take it too literally: perhaps this was a day I spent looking at flowers, waiting at traffic lights, or making a spinach and tomato soup, then trying not to snooze while watching TV) : )

Then to follow there are Time Stretched and Time Shrunk.

The last two are made by manipulating the same original picture, which is itself an edited photo, just as our brains seem to do with time!