artLife

beavertails greet you

just a taxicab driver

mugshot from the al-Glasses tribunal

Greetings, when this blog becomes temporarily blocked because of exceeding visitor capacity, please visit my newer blog-galleries ARTLIFE WEST and its second page DEEP INTO ARTLIFE WEST. Much of the artwork is the same, not all, but the newest work is displayed on those 2 pages. You can comment, too. Come see!

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welcome to the gallery:

let's go

16" x 6" watercolor on Arches

backseat drivers

I hope you have the time to

see all six linked pages.

As new work is finished,

it gets dropped-in wherever

there is a parking place.

Click on pictures to enlarge.

Thanks for visiting.

hell for bad cows

16" x 12" watercolor + graphite on Arches

the plane of 9/11

24" x 18" watercolor, colored pencil & graphite on Arches

We're still seething over the destruction to Babylon. I posted about it last weekend on one of my other blogs. If you haven't see the story yet, stop what you are doing and take a look. WRH has linked to the information twice this week on different sites, so word is definitely getting out. None of this can be kept under the radar for very long.

You know, it really can't go on like this, the trampling of history, the crumpling of all that is and ever was, sacred and inviolate. There seems to be no end in sight to the mayhem. On and on it goes, ad nauseum, into infinity, no matter who says or does what, we find ourselves living in a state of endless war. In the far away future, when texts speak of a past, what will it be? A series of blanks where once there were heartbeats?

I send my deep condolences to the extraordinarily talented Mr. Kelley's family and friends. His works brightened my trip so many times I can't remember them all. He was indeed a genius among us. His time with us was a life of vision that contributed an indelible legacy for generations into the future. G'wan Alton! You sure had it right.

Story/Gallery

Don't miss the photos link located on the Greatful Dead poster halfway down the page.

Welcome back.

How bittersweet. We know its going to happen again, that block due to exceeding viewer capacity thing, its the overarching sinus headache of the past two weeks. I'd love to ignore it, but for your sake I'd better not. I promise you alternatives are on the horizon, a variety of choices are being seriously considered and a decision coming soon.

To say I am dismayed that you were suddenly turned away is an understatement. Never have we seen such a startling example of how our internet has been taken over by homeowners' associations. Its as if the web was prime oceanfront property snatched up by desperate developers who can't do anything else but weasel into your pocket. Someone, somewhere, saw opportunity and unleased mercenary armies of political lobbyists and the unlimited world of shared knowledge was parceled practically overnight into gated communities. Surely they keep graphic designers busy laying out prospectus, revising used logos, manipulating font and color. Imagine a whole planet enveloped by bandwith and you'll see what they saw if you see things that way. But that isn't how it began. Where it is now is where it was never meant to be. There are multitudes of eloquent and altruistic testimonies to what it could have been which would have led all of us to a better, more honorable world. But in the New World, the real world, the world of war and corruption, greed and resouces appropriation, all that could have been has instead been barcoded and made moronic. They like to say things like "There's no free lunch." Your net, my friends, is just a tenth of an acre tent city with water meters and company stores. And you are subject to immediate foreclosure if you disobey to the rules. You don't have to believe me, I'm just a nobody painter, but you might take to heart the message you saw at this very URL from May 18th to June 1st.

The internet is unlimited.

There is no global warming.

Clean water, fresh air and the sun's radiant energy come with our birth package.

What is a conspiracy?

Just who are the victims of these massive present day conspiracies? And who are the conspirators? Can you tell the difference anymore? That's okay, don't tax your brain, being unaware of the difference was the intent and it has been accomplished. When they saw how well it worked, entire tribes of masked cockroaches rifled through the garbage cans of our lives while we were sleeping. Our attentions were earnestly riveted elsewhere and now its too late.

The die was irrevocably cast in stone by the eighties, in case you didn't catch it, I did because I happened to see Roger Rabbit, a lucrative tinseltown offering that meshed animation with film actors. I walked out of that theater into our sunny real world knowing life as we always knew it was gone forever, that anything could happen from that point on, that technology had entered the twilight zone of holographic population control. I might not have grasped the potentials nearly so quickly had I not been a graphic designer already involved with creating concepts for the consumer audience. In my spare time I restored fading family snapshots painstakingly pixel by pixel where accidents of experimentation led to a complete alteration of the original piece. A different family could be created. A different place and time. A different meaning to the photograph. It wasn't good, it wasn't what was intended. It wasn't real. But it could be done if the person at the helm was tasked to fabricate and falsify.

Which is the same process used over and over again in creating markets for, say, hybrid vehicles, organic foods, carbon taxes or ahem, protection from terrorists. Creating a market is the easiest part of a consumer product campaign because you and I are predictable statistics referred to as merchandise consumer units. If the artist tasked with visual elements is sort of picky, like me, taking weeks to reach a satisfactory alignment of palette and typography, it slows up the whole program and you'd be advised to make arrangements with employers to lower their overall standards of quality, something which also benefits employment figures. Do you see what might happen? Essentially, shortcuts to massive profits were taken on a grand scale without the production of real things to back them up. China has long known how this works and has become quite the master of reproducing knock-offs. You can pick them up any day or night on the street corners of Greenwich Village. At least they produce something. Our other partners sprinkled thoughout the globe are not so enterprising, yet. They see there is a campaign, but have no real incentive to come forth with anything of substance to deserve a campaign. Its all pictures and logos and come-ons, slick models that exists only as balsawood prototypes never seeing their way into production.

Real things that can't be bought are not commodities. A real web, sharing real knowledge between all levels of society existing in all locations of our globe is not a commodity. Unfortunately, the parallels to this unpleasant insight which are unfolding all around us, now more than ever before, speak for themselves. Think on that.

The predictable response to having your website blocked to visitors is to rush out and purchase an expensive domain name, register it and take out a subscription with a web hosting service (payable in advance of actually creating anything or even supplying the rudimentary tools required for such creation). As I already mentioned, you and I are predictable. We suffer from a common disease which manifests itself as an awareness of something strange lingering around the edges of rational thought, something blurry we can't quite bring into focus. *Because something is happening here, But you don't know what it is, Do you, Mister Jones?

We have to experience the trials of great pain and suffering before we can see it. By the time we know what it is, its too late to avoid the kharmic kickback. The barn door is open, the livestock are stampeding. Someone already predicted we'll just stand around taking pictures with our cellphones to upload to youtube.

*Ballad of a Thin Man, 1965, Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited. Speakers please.

Leaping tall buildings in a single jump. Soaring over the hi-lo country. Adjust the tailfeather ever so slightly and catch a thermal floating over the checkerboard farmlands. Why? Cuz its Spring at last. Boing! Boing! Amazing things, systems of species, buds unfurling, the departure and return of seasonal migrators, the Hawks' mating ballet, exist all around us, maybe we'll take a glider today and get the lay of the land for once and for all?

trail nothing left to buy

Millions upon millions of human beings typically see life as one dimensionally flat. Born on the ground, schooled on the ground, driving on the ground, stuck on the ground. Some are rattling the ice in cocktail tumblers on balconies overlooking the ground, others are waving from a ferry's stern to the crowd on the ground, some are lying on a beach watching each other lying on towels on the ground, a lot more are watching from behind windowpanes and windshields and sunglasses and the poorer ones look through ground floor store windows. Lots more lately are watching from cellphone cameras for that youtube moment...on the ground. Videos of ground activity, uploaded from the ground.

When a thought occurs a mental map appears in your mind, many maps accompany it, centering us into the destination of the thought. Imaginary maps from partial portions of photographs supplement the thought. The scenery of your mind, more often than not, is the scenery on the ground as if the mind has difficulty giving us an overhead shot where we might learn a lot more than we can recall about an experience, or when we're analyzing it later on down the road. The difficulty with that panoramic view is the part we most want to know. Apart from the desire, the mind balks at showing you anything you didn't see in your brain, looking at it through your very own eyes. But of course there was more, lots more. So you have to figure it out, but first figure out how to get mister mind to chill while you get the stepladder out of the cellar.

Hey, when we run out of oil, there really will be plenty to see and do! Like examing 10 million year-old glacial irregulars ( see bottom of page) left behind from the Pleistocene when oceans raced over the coasts and dragged groups of pebbled granite with it, now covered with black, brown, chartruse and cadmium orange moss, moisture-seeking pines and introduced cheatgrasses filling all available seams, surrounded by Oak sentinels, home to coon and hibernating reptile. The McMansions of evolution. They are still standing and they will still be standing 10 million years from now. Even the slanted rocky hideaway where Vasquez the Mexican bandit held off the feds is a trendy tourist destination. You think a meteor is going to change that? Hmmm, you're not living on the fault line, are you?

glacial irregulars glacial irregular

The propane water heater broke this week, (an adventure we see as the glass half-full since disaster was mysteriously averted) and we had to make do with plain old cold water. Very quickly, I found myself living the pioneer life, again, and it was not bad at all. It was just another experience in thinking outside of the consumerism box which is very natural once you get the hang of it. We actually dried the dishes. With dishtowels. Yes. Thanks to the Bill Monroe's fiddles and mandolins. Me and Jake, two-steppin' with the colander.

Our garden is coming together quite nicely as our grandparent's gardens did and their grandparent's garden did and their parents before them In the larger scheme of ancestral farming, gardens will grow everything necessary to sustain us. Everything is organic. There were no box supermarkets selling prepackaged "homestyle potato latke mix." No cuisinarts, no kitchen aids, no mister coffee, no dishwasher, no bread machines, toaster ovens, no toasters and so forth. You don't have that stuff when you go camping, do you, no. And isn't roughing it the whole point of camping? You can clean up in a lake. I hope you can anyway, because you might need to prepare yourself to like it. We might all be camping any day now. Save me a oceanfront space at Long Key.

After all the food is gone, even though it was beyond your means anyway, you'll be sorry you didn't have a little something growing instead of watching yourself diminish in size, all your rag jeans dripping from your frame, even a belt won't help after a certain point. You'll be angry, but too weak to compose a continous thought. Work out? Stroll over to the glacial irregulars and ponder evolution, are you serious?

Okay, at least we're in agreement these are strange times. Maybe not for you personally (lucky you) but you know something's happening somewhere because you don't live in a vaccuum.

If you are like me and see that blame is not a true problem solution, then get to work, roll up those sleeves and plot out your space. Think John and Abigale Adams, the pretty yard, overflowing with abundance, think Monet, soft pastels, life as art in a garden, partaking in the never ending growth of Planet Earth.

jardinagivermy Jardin a Giverny

A gardener-abstractionist-artist friend tipped me off to the secret of pest control. Marigolds, she said. Beautiful and useful.

doesn't like bugs

I am extremely fond of the Alphonse de Lamartine quote where he referenced something akin to the more he sees of his own kind, the more he appreciates his dogs. With this in mind, you'll find a whole new page devoted exclusively to some of the animals either living here, or walked or flew into our world for however long they could stay.

By now, it should be obvious to repeat visitors here that the textual blog part merely supports the visuals. The visuals are a sharing of life with anyone who wants to see. The subjects are pretty much mundane, everyday stuff, except for a few of those collages thrown in for visitors with the drive to make it deeper into my back pages. But still, this is all part and parcel of what our global world has become. These are the images that will mark us into the future, whatever that may be. Quite a few of the images, especially the farmhouse series on page 3, are spaces in time where people of our past marked their journeys doing the same thing, creating works to outlive themselves. In painting them, I make myself the judge that disperses the verdict that their endeavors, however grand or humble, stand the test of time. In this way it can be said that all creative efforts, selfless production without ego, is our contribution to posterity, a legacy of how we live and how we feel about it. The great literary genius, Henry James, said of his protagonist, Benvolio (1875), endeavor that does not lead one to broaden his relations with others and the world at large, leads to ennui:

... One was often idle when one seemed to be ardently
occupied; one was always idle (it might be concluded) when one's occupations had not a high aim. One
was idle therefore when one was working simply for one's self. Curiosity for curiosity's sake, art for art's
sake, these were essentially broken-winded steeds. Ennui was at the end of everything that did
not entangle us somehow with human life ...

Better late than never I always say. Why so long between posts? Take it up with Jake, the puppy who took over our kingdom last July.

Meanwhile, I come to find my siblings, thousands of miles away to the east and south, aquired puppies at the same time. Whatever circumstances transpired to bring them into our lives, it is thought provoking to ask why and who they are to us. I have my own ideas on this matter.

All thanks and praises to the Life Force, ever-cycling.

There's a lot to see. Words can't compete.

My promise has been kept. There are five new things buried in a treasure hunt. Can you find them? Hint: there is something on every page except for "windgods", which is sacrosanct. Like Jimmy Reed, like the Beatles. You don't go messing with a good thing.

Thanks for visiting.

5 or 6 new works are coming by next week. I've lost track, of course. It might be more. This stuff just burst forth almost out of nowhere. To "see" something is no longer to take it for granted. Everything, anything, after a certain point becomes a springboard for ideas. Those ideas are never fixed, especially in watercolor. The paint transforms at its own speed with its own plan. What happens then, well, that's just what happens. The whole point is to go with the flow. Its when we contend against the flow that trouble starts. To attempt to change or alter the course nature intended is when mistakes are made.

But are they mistakes? Only if one regrets the action, otherwise mistakes can be handled as detours which have their own beauty.

A friend and I were traveling to a national park and became lost on the highway. We took a detour and discovered a forgotten community "almost out of nowhere" suspended in simplicity, untouched by box stores and home owners' associations. Later on, its not the national park I remember, its the little town.

Travel anywhere you like on this site.

We are the masters of our own destinations.

ventanas

36" x 24" watercolor on Arches

Glacial Irregular vacations at Sunrise Mountain

20" x 14" watercolor and colored pencil on Arches

sheep's cathedral

20" x 14" watercolor on Arches

Since you have come this far, so fast, let's visit some wise friends, the light bearers, who are holding tiki torch openhouse parties along The Path. We Hansels and Gretls need a variety of nutritious insights packed in our knapsacks to sustain us through these darkest of the deep woods on our way towards destination unknown.

There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Sing along now: Val der ree, val der rah, val der ree, val der rah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, val der ree, val der rah, my knapsack on my back.

For the side zip pockets:

Visible Origami - an out-of-time castle of corridors with hidden doors and winding staircases leading to stained glass spires and glowing turrets of the soul. bring ear phones

Signs of the Times - any oneliner description is injustice, but it has been wisely noted as "venerable"

A Photo Essay on the Great Depression - stark rewind in black and white. batteries included

Tao Te Ching - What is, IS. The Lao Tze intro, tuck inside your right front zip pocket.

The Truth Seeker - exactly what its name suggests, for once. Yaaaaay, ah, sunglasses, please.

Metronome Online - your beat keeper

Country Joe's jukebox - Again, turn up your ears

What Really Happened - just see for yourself. sunglasses advised. leis and poi included in travel package

Hymn to the Magdalene - Claire Karst Rivero, speakers ON. period.

Citizen Kane - review ... Rosebud ...

Tropic Arts - oil, guache, watercolor genius at work and play

Ralph Eugene Meatyard - photographer, human being, some called 'southern gothic'

Embellishing Jupiter - watercolor wanderlust in love with life

Darwin Wiggett - photographer, naturalist, lay back in the grass and groove with his gifts

Just Get There - brand new community blog, lots to see, lots to learn. Share something heavy that moves you, changed you, share things that we need to know right now

Eugene Atget - description not required, is it.

Baghdad Year Zero - What Naomi saw when she visited the war zone

The Quilts of Geesbend - astounding art born from Slavery, a collective history, art, music, events

TOFA - transforming the world, one connection at a time

The Washington Note - real time political insider, three Weimaraners and a full dance card, backed by an informed chorus of readers ... don't miss POA on pedal steel

Twenty Great American Stories - I like to study the works of skilled writers, a lot. You, too?

Beer and Incence - following the Path in a mainstream world of weirdness

Tiny URL - clever tool to shorten long URLs so they don't distort blogger's comment pages all out of proportion

IRIS Seismic Monitor - worldwide interactive earthquake charts in real time, headlines, tetonic plates

Current Fire Detections - frequently updated current large wildfire maps in jpg. Click on any region

Thomas Cole - The Voyage of Life, Founder of the Hudson River School.

Guinea Lynx - Guinea Pigs' essential medical guide and forum

Native American Quotes - to think on and remember all you ever read, were told and heard, then think again

The Daily Coyote - Meet Charlie, Wyoming adoptee, mister too-cool, living with Shreve, a remarkable photographer

Mustang Accounting - Vegas cowgirls untangle your past, present and future life into clean little columns of compliance. Keep them close ... every day is tax season, even while trekking into destination unknown.

The Existentialist Cowboy - Watch cowpoke-daredevil Hart rope the steer. Look for him also in sott.net Features. Oooooopey ki yay...

Think these will fit in the knapsack?

there is a lot more to see

but take care on your way

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If you wish to use any copyright protected material from this site please direct inquiries to: spiritcanyon@earthlink.net