Earth Crosses — Prints at Grater Goods coming up!

earth crosss postcard-vl1

A series of six prints on thick A2 cotton paper selected from

Gallery — Earth Crosses

The Earth Crosses images are a series that began as my Thousand Sketches project ended. The last image of the 1000 was #1000 Departing Force and it is part of this exhibition.

The images are a dialogue between the horizontal and the vertical. Opposites. All the images in the series are square. The vertical, perhaps the landscape, has as much space as the horizontal, perhaps the portrait aspect. Think dialectics, yin yang. I expect I’ll get to elaborate on the opening night. (Date TBA)

Digital Sketches – desire of the pen

Since my project ThousandSketches I have continued to sketch.  Digital painting – but I like the term sketch.  Many of these are on my art website. That site is still there but I’ve deprecated it and tried to integrate it into this blog.  It’s a bit of a mess. Still, this blog becomes an art blog when you click the Art Category. Digital Sketches delivers just my own work.

I’m warming up to posting more.  I’ve beed reflecting on the delicacy of nature, and the crudeness of humanity’s sometimes beautiful desire to transcend itself.  This began with the earth crosses…  natural textures of landscape cut by something I think of as human presence, fast and bold.

That’s 12 years ago. “Green Peace”

Here is a recent one – not in the earth cross series but maybe in a new one.

Maybe it is called “Science”, or “Civilisation”.  Playing on the theme of putting borders or frames around art.

Do I put these in the container?  or are they better left wild?

Itchy pen.

 

 

Earth Crosses

The way up and the way down are one and the same – Heraclitus

I have these up somewhere from years ago, but I’m not maintaining that site.

 

 

 

 

Layers upon layers

This image is all mouse. The Tablet PC is down.

Layers and layers
Larger Image.

I was thinking today about layers. There are heaps of layers in this image, as in most of what I do. The Earth Crosses are also to do with depth. The “vertical” line goes up and down. The life line in that direction is vastly different from that in the horizontal line. A line that goes “across” like that invariably is seen as the horizon, the earth edge.

In my work as a psychotherapist I always think “deep”. I want the work with my clients to go deep. But what is deep? My son once said, while pondering this with his fresh mind, it is “wide on its side”, nice! But it is not so. In the case of wide one end is equivalent qualitatively to the other. With the vertical line that is not so.

Deep means going into origins, not the past per se, though origins are usually in the past. Perhaps the future can draw us, and thus origins could be seen in the future as well.

Maori have a word: Whakapapa which is tied the notion of a layer, papa. Ah, a quote, from here, that expresses the exact idea I was looking for:

“Papa” is anything broad, flat and hard such as a flat rock, a slab or a board. “Whakapapa” is to place in layers, lay one upon another. Hence the term Whakapapa is used to describe both the recitation in proper order of genealogies, and also to name the genealogies. The visualisation is of building layer by layer upon the past towards the present, and on into the future. The whakapapa include not just the genealogies but the many spiritual, mythological and human stories that flesh out the genealogical backbone.

The layers of a painting give it its dept, they cover its origins, they influence the next layer, and the final layer is a relationship with a viewer. My Earth Crosses, flat and hung vertically I think of as a more transverse section with the top being the ether and the lower reaches the depths. The vertical line however is the yang to the yin of the earth. it is something only humans do, see into the depths of the soul and reach for the spirits of the sky.

Here is another Another version of this Earth Cross:

Layers and layers
Larger Image.