Yesterday the nearly 60 degree weather lured me from my studio work to the outdoors.
I was again, I know I just can't stop myself, at play with my iPhone and macro lens. There's something seductive about playing at the micro (then why do they call it macro?) level.
It gives me comfort that there is an underlying structure not seen through my usual senses.
You know that green scummy stuff in ponds? Well here's what it looks like frozen - something primordial here . . . perhaps it's that instar moment when the goo became something?

Recently I read this short article questioning the need for galleries in the 'digital' age. Seriously? Can you not feel the difference between a digital image of a painting and the actual painting? Really?
Is there no difference between a virtual/digital tree and an actual tree?
Perhaps I've been reading too many simplistic opinions on blogs lately. Ah well . . .

Today I'm hanging the unseen River Scrolls using these small bu powerful neodymium magnets. Here's a wiki-blurb:

The greater force exerted by rare earth magnets creates hazards that are not seen with other types of magnet. Neodymium magnets larger than a few centimeters are strong enough to cause injuries to body parts . . .  If possible, one should bear the pain and do whatever one can to keep the distance from closing up; only then should one pull free.

They are NOT kidding.

Today I am remembering yesterday's posting from my fellow painter and friend Nancy Natale about Cezanne's journey as an artist. The post was from an article in The Guardian and it's author John Berger wrote about Cezanne moving from a black box to the light of the world, moving from what I think of as a reasonable understanding of light to a felt one.

I'm also thinking about David Hockney and his camera obscura theory, about how many (probably most) notable paintings were made using this technology. Nothing wrong with that but it does 'flatten' the world into a single perspective.

I'm thinking also about mu current work with digital technology of my iPhone and about how the pixels and light work. About how the eye and mind's eye sense the light.

I love the last line of John Berger's article:
"Cézanne's conviction that what we perceive as the visible is not a given but a construction, put together by nature and ourselves. "The landscape," he said, "thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness." He also said: "Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet.""

And lastly I'm thinking about my new digital world view using my iPhone and how we can be transformed in the twinkling of an eye.

Many of you know I have altered my digital world view by using Photojojo's macro lens on my good ole iPhone.

What you see here is ice on a pond. Cool no!? And below are some morning glory seeds and other unknown seed skeletons, oh, and my beloved rose hips.

I am indeed again playing in Mowgli's magical realm.

I recently read an article about David Hockney by Martin Grayford. The article was called The Mind's Eye. It ended with this:

"Art is a way—you might say a set of technologies—for making images, preserving them in time, and also for showing us things we aren't normally aware of. Those things might include gods, dreams, and myths, but also hedgerows.

'Don't we need people who can see things from different points of view?' Hockney asks. 'Lots of artists, and all kinds of artists. They look at life from another angle.'"

I was going to post part two of my Streaming Stillness statement which is my attempt to describe just what it is I am painting.

What happens for me is the inspiration moves through me and I translate it using colors, feeling tones, mediums, pretty much all that I can grab hold from that feeling of inspiration. And then, only much later, the words to explain it arrive.

But this morning I read these beautiful words describing what I'm doing. Here's a link to Simon G. Powell's blog. It pretty much explains why I use both natural pigments and my iPhone. Here's his final paragraph:

"To see and feel the biosphere for what it really is -- namely a fabulous system of self-organizing intelligence -- is to become a newly conscious expression of that intelligence. And that is the stuff the profoundest dreams are made of."

So yes we can.

Statement from Streaming Stillness Gallery one:

Journey markers, inukshuit and reliquaries


“If we are to survive we must have ideas, vision and courage.
These things are rarely produced by committees everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins  with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.”
~Arthur M. Schelsinger

I began painting this series just after 9/11. It’s not that I planned it that way it’s just that my own spiritual awakening coincided with this cataclysmic event.
I suppose like those around me, I felt my world shaking under my feet and
I was seeking some stability.

That event combined with my own life events led me to a greater awareness that public space doesn’t end at the borders of visible, perceptible reality
but extends into the invisible. Into places where my ordinary senses could
not discern or understand. It led me to the idea that
the heart is an organ of perception.

Twenty years earlier I’d stepped out onto the vast emptiness of the arctic tundra. This experience rekindled a memory deep inside me. It was a sense
of stillness. And this memory lay dormant until I let go of my seemingly prescribed life and stepped into uncharted territory.

This imagery, these stone piles, like inukshuit and cairns became my markers. They helped me to not get lost. Like all markers they told me I was here
but not necessarily where I was going or where I’d come from.
And, most importantly, that someone had  gone before. They stood,
and still stand, as symbols of my interconnectedness.

I’m now certain there is no such thing as distance or proximity which defines connectibility. This idea lifts me beyond a geography which defines spaces
and offers me something which is neither social nor ‘real’ space
but is simply associations.

Within this meaning I locate stillness.
Stillness exists within ordinary sensing as an element of essence and mystery.  A place where I am able to recreate my sense of place without boundaries. A place that is forever becoming yet never materializing.
A place where the idea of an image becomes both possibility and impossibility suggesting other ways of imagining, of seeing, and of being in the world.