Idealist

Enlightenment

As I look and move on the Earth, I see beauty in nature.  Coming forward is the idiosyncratic Zen nun version of my being.  My eyes receive the gifts of strong trunked trees, filigree leaf patterns, dappled sunlight. My eyes are small, but my sight is large.

Idealist

An unrepentant idealist, I mingle with fellow humans, I receive my daily programing from the fear box. And I want to know, "Why are we so screwed up?".  Idealist, that I am.  Seeing potential for productive, creative existence on Earth.  Longing for peace and harmony.  I dare to wish for enduring happiness. What could we accomplish if we were truly sane?  What if we cooperated?  What if we raised our children in safe harmonious communities?  What if we did not have to whore for the almighty dollar?

How much human labor actually contributes to the well being of people?  And how much labor is just miserable slavery?  How many of us are bean counters?  Why do we need so much insurance?  There are more bookkeepers than organic farmers.  Health insurance salesmen make more than the nurses that actually deliver the care. Well, I really dont want to get into an extended rant right now.

If we could focus on raising our children to fulfill their potential for the highest and best good of all, we would have a better world in only 20 years.

Call me an idealist.  Some will call me a fool.  Why waste my brainwaves on the impossible? 

I should turn on the TV, there is an acute need to update my programming.  I should go shopping.  Get a bunch of new stuff.  Max out the credit card.  Renew the stress of debt.  Then I will be willing to do whatever useless shit the boss master tells me to do.  Then will you call me a fool?

Little Ole Man

 

Little Ole Man

 

 

 Sourpuss

 

 Here sits the pensive child.  Two years old, he has been on Earth for 730 days. He suckled mothers milk, then was prodded to graduate to  cows milk in a cup.  Perhaps suckling is the most comforting of human activities.  Could it be that in his short life he has already lost the most satisfying gem of experience?  Did he find nirvana at his mother's breast?  He will have no memories of very early age, but may spend the rest of his life with nameless longing.

 

And before that, before the breast, floating the womb, what were his feelings?  Is it true as Otto Rank theorized that uterine life is blissful, that the pain of squeezing through the narrow vaginal cave is the original fall from grace?

 

The ground of the px is a tangle of twigs.  A map of life full of dead ends, cul de sacs, and proceeding the wrong way on a one way street.

 

Over his right shoulder levitates the cherubic Balloon Girl.  Yes, there it is, love and joy, awaiting the right time, the right action, the right person, the right mental attitude, and a lot of luck.

 

Woman Poem

The mouth of her womb

her pleasure center

is a bleeding wound.

 

Each of us entered Earth

through this door.



 

 

 

 

 The little Ole Man, seven hundred thirty days his handlers have molded his behavior. 

 

 Looking like a wise and discouraged old man.  Looking thoughtful, pensive.  How many lives has he lived on this twisted planet?

 

 

America the Beautiful

America the Beautiful

 

 

This picture is a visual metaphor for the unrecorded collateral damage caused to Americans by American war.  Bombs bursting in air.

In this picture, a cherubic brother and sister walk through a heavenly landscape.  Overhead insectoid helicopters threaten to spit death.  Usually, our death machines spray brown people.  Here we see blue eyed, blond children to illustrate that when America goes to war, we also damage ourselves. The unseen damage done to returning soldiers and their families can be as great as the war kill body count. Domino effect collateral damage is not factored into the official war losses.  Soldier suicide rates are high.  Who is counting the suicides that occur after discharge?  Widows and fatherless children suffer immeasurable damage.  Post traumatic stress disorder in soldiers emotionally cripples  the men for the rest of their lives and distresses their families.

This visual metaphor works for me and I hope that it works for you. 

I must thank the amazing British graffiti artist, Banksy for this inspiration.  Thanks Banksy!

I think that really civilized people would find ways to solve problems without resorting to barbaric war. 
 

The body count is only a small part of the expense of war.  Money is the smallest part of the expense.  Unrecorded collateral damage to the "American conquerors" is horrifying.    The domino effect of collateral damage, applies not only to the country that is invaded, but also to the invaders.

 

My hairdresser, Angelle, is a foster parent angel.  She took in a one year old baby, call him Sam.  Sam's father had been deployed to Iraq.  After his military service,  Daddy returned home with an intact body.  One week after discharge,  he blasted a terminal gunshot wound to his head.  Sam's Mommy, in hellish grief, turned to crack.  Using the drug she created for herself a hell on earth.  She found this drug hell preferable to the hell of grief over the senseless death of her husband.  Sam ended up in foster care.  His only stroke of luck was to get Angelle as his foster mother.  Sam was developmentally retarded, from sharing two levels of hell with his Mom.  It took months of Tender Loving Care from Angelle to help him trust again. 

 

Daddy did not show up in the body count.  Mommy was not counted.  Even with a good foster mother,  Sam will have emotional challenges that last his entire lifetime.  These tragedies do not show up on any balance sheet.  But, they are the heartbreaking domino effect, collateral damage cost of war. 

 

This is a clipping from Wikipedia:

       U.S. Army report indicates military veterans have double the suicide rate of non-veterans, and more active-duty soldiers are dying from suicide than in combat in the Iraq War (2003-2011) and War in Afghanistan (2001–present).^[11] Colonel Carl Castro, director of military operational medical research for the Army noted "there needs to be a cultural shift in the military to get people to focus more on mental health and fitness."^[12]

 

This bears repeating  "More active duty soldiers are dying from suicide than in combat in...current wars."  WHY? What does this mean?  Young men enter military service to patriotically fight for their country.  Next they commit suicide.  What happened?

 

Mental health?  Does the Colonel mean that you should have a good attitude to kill?  How does that work? 

 

I just do not get it!  Why do we have endless wars?  None of the answers make sense to me.  There must be another way.

 

Do we war for petroleum?  Disgusting reason.  Then let us stop all the caffeine fueled driving around in circles.  Do our cars run on blood?  The blood of murdered enemies?  The blood of our soldiers? The collateral damage blood?

 

They tell me that Saddam Husein had to be killed.  I don't get it.  How many lives did it cost?  Husein murdered his own people and raped the environment.  For nine years we murdered Iraq people and sent our sons to death and raped the environment.  Are we the good guys?

 

Then there is the argument that we must  show strength in order to scare off the bully countries.  Something like that.  How is it worded?  Is this true???  We out bully the bullies? Is that a sane intervention?  What about the tactic taught in good martial arts classes?  Just having the strength is enough, it is not necessary to use it.  We are not really civilized.  We are barbarians.  We are not very highly evolved.  Really civilized people work out their differences without resorting to violence. 

 

We patriotically protect our way of life, they say, that is why we bomb brown people.   But, we are over consumers, wasteful and arrogant and our children are spoiled.  We protect a way of life that uses resources like tissue paper.  Our homes are constipated with consumer goods produced by slave labor in third world countries.  Our greed knows no bounds. Should people die to support our gluttonous way of life?

 

Don't get me started on a rant.

There must be another way.

There are some good things about America.  Good people.  Beautiful scenery.  Free speech.  I am exercising my patriotic  right to free speech.  I love my country but hate war.

 

 

OK,  I must go now.  I am going shopping, even though I already have too much stuff.  I dare you to open my closet doors.  Don't forget to wear a helmet for protection when all the junk falls out.  I must have the very latest T-shirt and jeans. My old jeans are so last year.  I will max out my credit cards.  It is the American way.  I am a good patriotic consumer supporting the economy.  The debt that I incur will insure that I continue working my bull shit job, and continue contributing my stressed filled labor to the American way of life.    Wrong.  Ironic black humor.

 

America the Beautiful.  Where is it?  How does it work?  How can we make it better?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Madonna for Primates

 



Madonna for Primates

 

 

 

Detail

 

 

Finally, a compassionate mother goddess for gorrillas and apes.  Animals have rights too, you know.  They have needs and emotions similar to humans.  No longer must they settle on worshiping a human Madonna, finally they have a representation from their own ethnic group.  A gorrilafication of their deep need for unending, all accepting mother love.   Apes, gorillas, and even monkeys, can meditate on this image and feel their hearts expand with the warmth of perfect love.

 

All they need now is a primate friendly church.  You may send a donation for the Holy Gorilla Tabernacle of Devine Primates Building Fund to my address.  Be generous. 

 

This is the digital picture that I am working on now.  Madonna for Primates, continues the themes, the series of Mary is My Muse, and The Persistence of Worship.  Religious mashup is the name of the game.  I am really trying to be respectful of religion, but the devil made me do it.  I mean, I think that a lighthearted approach to religion is helpful.  No disrespect intended. 

 

This px continues my artistic research into deep religious needs.  It illustrates that love is cross species.  Love flows through all cultures, ethnic groups, and many species. 

I have seen a mother cat hug a kitten.  The kitten was separated from her mother for about twenty hours. You could see that they were joyful to be reunited.  Mama cat lay on her back, with baby on her stomach, she hugged the child to her chest.

 Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall taught us much about love in primates. 

 

 

 When painting,  I continue to chase beauty.  The hues here satisfy my hunger for color.   The shapes compose interlocking circles, similar to a spiral.  You may see spiral composition in some of my other pictures.  Madonna, roughly a pyramid shape, is stable, grounded and protective. 

 

Halos, as I have mentioned before, offer room for poetic license.  Madonna Primate wears a halo which is a translation of the famous rose window of Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris.  The top of the background borrows from a Clarence John McLaughlin photograph.  The bottom of the loosely interpreted jungle scene uses a vintage botanical print for reference.  This was a beautiful print until I started messing with it.  You can still identify the Venus Fly Trap and Pitcher Plants. The smiles of the mother and child are entirely my fault.  No one else should be blamed. 

Hey yall,  leave a comment, I want to know what you think.  Hate it? Love it? Indifferent?  Please let me know how you react to my babbling and dabbling.

 

 

 

   

Altar Alter

 Alter Altar 

 

 

 

 

Alter Altar with Bleeding Jesus

 

 

 

  Balloon Girl

Detail.  One of my cherubs

 

 

 

 

Bleeding Jesus and Buddha

Detail

 

 

 

Lucky Dog Cherub

 



Monkey, Hanging Out

Detail

 

Lessons from Jim Jonestown

Ganesha Kaleidoscope 

Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles

Ganesha in Blue

 

Lessons From Jim Jones-town

An extreme example of religion hijacking the deep needs of humans

Led by evangelist Jim Jones, nine hundred American people performed mass suicide by drinking cyanide laced kool aide, on November 18, 1978, in the jungle of Guyana.

How can this happen??? I know that people are crazy, but this boggles the mind.  Women gave their babies poison, and then took their own dose. NINE HUNDRED.

An extreme example of religion hijacking humanity's deepest needs. An example of people who were searching for answers, community, spiritual elation.  People who wanted to know how to do the right thing.  People who wanted to be told how to do right.  They wanted a saintly leader.  Jim Jones hooked into these needs and led them to mass suicide.

Recently I watched the documentary,  "American Experience: Jones-town The Life and Death of Peoples Temple", PBS.  I ordered the video from Netflicks because I was curious as to why 900 people would die on the command of a religious leader.  This continues my artistic research into, The Persistence of Worship.  I watched the video and saw that it had significance for my subject, so I watched it again and wrote notes.

Mothers gave their babies the poison, watched them die, and then took their own lethal kool aide.  Real life, worse than a horror movie.  How can this happen?  What does this tell us about being a human?  For on some level we are all mostly alike, sharing the same DNA, the same cerebral hills and valleys.  We may say, "Oh, I would never do that."  But we do not know what we would do in extreme circumstances.  Only six of the congregation escaped into the jungle.

Yes, I am sure that we all consider ourselves more mentally healthy than the pitiful followers of a psychopathic preacher.

And, I guess, most of us are more healthy.  People who are vulnerable to cult behavior do not have a strong and workable belief system, so they welcome a charismatic, authoritarian father figure, to tell them what to believe and what to do. They want their life to have meaning.

I have heard that  some people have good parents.

That is what I heard, some people have good parents.  But, I have come to think that parenting is impossible to get perfectly right.  There are to many factors involved in life on earth for anyone to get it exactly right.  Really, we just dont know what to do.  We are confused and ignorant and wonderfully wise.

Denial, better known as positive thinking, does help. It is better not to think about it to much.  It is better to go rake the leaves. I think that I will make a pot of jambalaya.  Chicken and sausage with jasmine rice.

 Most of us are still searching for perfect parental love. Searching for the person who will celebrate our faults. We tend to project our image of the perfect father onto preachers and Gods, (celebrities and royalty).. We see the longing movies of our minds on the screen of a person who demonstrates a few of the characteristics for which we are searching. 

The human condition, the conundrum is that we know so much, but we are unable to answer the biggest questions.  We have a need to know.  Jim Jones hooked into deep basic needs, just as any religion does.

We want control, but life can knock us down with surprising disasters.  We are buffeted by Biblical intensity weather.  Tomorrow is uncertain.  You, I, us, our life could be wiped out on the road this afternoon.  Any of us or our loved ones could disappear forever due to a very small blood clot. We can loose our jobs.  The list of blows is endless. Religions offer the impression that people may pray to God, perform rituals, and have some control and  protection.

How much of our activity is exerted in order to distract us from these hard, mostly denied truths?  We manage to live.  Even to thrive.  In spite of our ignorance. Denial helps.


Loving and creating is the best revenge. 


Here is what Wikipedia writes about the psychology of cult followers:

Under Langone's deliberative model, people are said to join cults primarily because of how they view a particular group. Langone notes that this view is most favored among sociologists and religious scholars. Under the "psychodynamic model", popular with some mental health professionals, individuals choose to join for fulfillment of subconscious psychological needs. Finally, the "thought reform model" states that people do not join because of their own psychological needs, but because of the group's influence through forms of psychological manipulation. Langone claims that those mental health experts who have more direct experience with large numbers of cultists tend to favor this latter view

At the same time, she adds, labeling a group a "cult" makes people feel safe, because the "violence associated with religion is split off from conventional religions, projected onto others, and imagined to involve only aberrant groups."^[49] This fails to take into account that child abuse, sexual abuse, financial extortion and warfare have also been committed by believers of mainstream religions, but the pejorative "cult" stereotype makes it easier to avoid confronting this uncomfortable fact. 


Yea, you may die this afternoon.  No, I cannot tell you, no one can tell you, what the fug you should do. No one can tell you, they may give you hints, but really no one knows.  Bad shit happens all the time. But, many  wonderful things can also happen.  Other people give us the gifts of their love and attention.  We often obtain our goals.  I did not say that it is all bad.  It is crazy, wonderful, sucky bad, delicious  good, all mixed together. The agony and the ecstasy, so intertwined, so very twisted.

Paintings from the "Persistence of Worship Series"

 MARY AND KRISHNA

Oil on canvas, 48"x36", 2012

YOSHODA AND JESUS

Oil on canvas, 48"x36", 10/2012

 Yashoda and Jesus

Photograph of painting on easel

 

 Paintings from the Persistence of Worship Series 

 In my blog from August, I documented the painting on canvas of Yoshoda and Jesus.  After that blog I painted for a few more weeks.  I intended to document finishing the painting, and, I took some pictures but they did not come out well.  The pictures here show the completed painting, a photographed version and a digitally enhanced version of the photo.  Since the August  documentation I mainly changed the face of Jesus.  And did several days of detail polishing. 

 The finished work is a visual feast on canvas,  intriguing images in sumptuous color. My son said,  "It looks playful, inspiring.  I think that it means something, but I dont know what? "  Which shows that he does not read my blog. He is too busy, raising a family. I liked his uninformed feed back.

Don Marshal,  New Orleans art royalty at the Contemporary Arts Center said that my work is "fresh and edgy".  I thank him for that. 

After the painting was finished I took the photo and worked it in Photo Shop.  I am better at digital painting than photography.  So the whole process went like this,  I first created the digital image, made a print and used it as a model for the hard oil on canvas, then photographed, then worked again in digital.  I am resisting the urge to touch up the canvas again.  Art is never finished, you just move on to the next project.

I re-posted the Mary and Krishna, in order to have the pair, Mary and Yoshada, in close proximity.  These two pictures are an artistic epiphany.  Following my muse, I often do not know where she will lead, I get an idea for a picture and toss it around in my mind for a while.  Some of the work is done while I am sleeping.  The Persistence of Worship Series, has been a interesting vein to mine.  The words come after the pictures.  The concept is verbalized after the series is in process. The series has motivated me to examine my personal belief system, and scan the history of world religions. Artistic process as a form of research.  Introspective research combined with not very rigorous historical research. 

The Mary and Yoshoda pictures, (switched at birth), illustrate, to put it into a nutshell, "The universal human need to give and receive compassionate, nonjudgmental love."
 

I AM CONFUSED, IS THAT A PROBLEM?

When, in my last post, I said that I am an admitted stupid human, I am referring to the humankind predicament of not knowing.  Our not knowing of the most important big questions.  "What am I?  What should I do? Will Katrina come back?"  The human race experiences a constant, mostly unconscious and denied, insecurity,  because these questions are never empirically satisfied. Personally, I am blessed with a fairly sharp intelligence and abundant creativity but must admit that I am missing a few marbles.  Oh, well. You may have noticed the missing marbles part.  I blame it on ADD, Attention to a Different Drummer.