#1098

45.7×60.9cm (18×24)” Oil on Arches 140lb cold press. Water mixable oils, thinned with water, work like watercolors on paper, and with the darker tones and saturated colors of oils. This is only an experiment… paper is unprimed. The paper will probably have to be primed with gesso, but then… impermanence has it’s place.  But then if the concern is expansion of paper under a the older, and stiffer oil, causing cracking, a thin wash shouldn’t be a problem.
#1098
View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down.

An Animal at Home in it’s World

Image result for free photos wolf sleeping

Our emotional state may have little relationship to the situation of the moment; we process time, outside of time. We all know that. A minute can feel like an hour, a week like a minute, but I’m thinking of something else, how what we feel, that whole complex mess of our emotional state, is outside time…. pushing to re-enter the moment, the moment that itself has nothing to do with time, but is our connection to … everything happening, from the center of our body outward in concentric — or perhaps — not so concentric, rings.

In thought, we step out of — away from — the real, but our feelings aren’t like that. They are always connected–why we can’t control them–how, when we’re stuck in our thoughts–they seem not even a part of us. But they are… us. They are what we are–in the uncontrollable wilderness of the Real.

I have a Faerie Alter. Because my thinking self wants to explain this, because it’s not about belief in anything outside of material reality–I say, I want to nourish the contradiction, and let it go at that. But who am I talking to when I say this? My feelings have no need for that explanation. It’s always the thoughts, trying to capture, and own… what is beyond knowing.

Last night, around 1:00 am, when I was going to bed, I lit a candle on the Faerie Alter (no longer “my” alter… ). Someone had told me they were being treated for some medical condition. This morning I received an email. Last night, at 1:00 am, the person I’d been thinking about, had surgery for appendicitis.

To say — to explain this as a coincidence, or to claim that it must be something more, are two ways our thinking self removes us from the aporia… the uncontrollable real.
… how much of the anxiety, the trauma of memories… are but my feelings, pushing, struggling, to return me to the Moment … to become again… or at last… an animal at home its world?

 

 

Imagination Shall Make us Free

Surreal, Death, Desert, Dark, Prison
from 2014, on my old blog

Friday, December 19, 2014
Imagination Shall Make Us Free!

In a Facebook post, Nyle Fort, wrote of the difficulty of seeing past the neoliberal simulacra to find what is real. Maybe it helps to see this, not as binary opposites, but different *kinds* of real. In the way a fictional character is real, *as* a fictional character– which nonetheless has real generative effects.
The spectacle, too, is real, but a reality whose generative effects impair both thought and perception in such a way that we cannot see past the simulacra, or imagine, while in its thrall, another kind of reality. That suggests to me, that the way to another reality–one we can inhabit in the fullness of our human being–is not like breaking through a curtain to something that lies there, already existing, on the other side, but in the very power of imagination on which the illusion depends, that our hope lies in knowing that that power is immeasurably greater than what has been drawn on by the oppressive system holding us hostage. Like in the Faerie Queene–the flames surrounding Busirane’s castle, real enough to burn Scudamore–because he believes they are the wrong kind of real, a reality over which he has no power, while Britomart walks through them unscathed. It’s our collective belief in the simulacra that makes it ‘real’ — that is, gives it power to generate effects–in that way, challenging collective beliefs is the very essence of the work of the imagination.
We do not dance as relief from fighting oppression; we dance, because out of the dance, come the flames of passion that will burn the citadels of our oppressors. We do not sing or paint or rap or create stories to escape from one illusion to another–but TO IMAGINE THE REAL WE DESIRE, THAT WE MIGHT CREATE IT AND MAKE IT SO!

#718 Eternal Spring

For Da Vinci Art Alliance Memeber’s Show: Dec 1-22. Reception, Dec 1. 6:00
Mixed Media: Watercolor, ink, Silver acrylic, glitter. 16×20 Framed. $125
#718.JPG
View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down.