The Individual: America's Heart & Soul

 Featured image: Soulful Jazz Singer

“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”

“Everything is energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you can not help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”

"I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care about money. Decorations, titles or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. I claim credit for nothing. A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future."  Albert Einstein

The Individual: Americas Heart & Soul

Individualism, the rights of people, all people is a sovereign right in the United States.  The creative process belongs to a single individual creator. 

We all learn from others that have created before us.  We are taught how to think and how to create from those who have come before us. We exchange and intermingle our creative ideas with theirs.

No one can teach another how to be themself or how to think for themselves.  Even with all of the exchanges that have happened, it is still only the individual that can do that.  Otherwise, they are not unique and authentic. They would be working with another’s spirit and another’s soul, not their own. 

It is also extremely difficult if one is using the thinking of another to see individuals, unique, authentic individuals and their inalienable individual rights. Hence, my extreme caution when I see another that is not thinking for themselves but using the thoughts and thinking of another.  

Sometimes it is hard to find one’s unique self and soul.  But,  thinking on your own and not thinking the way that another thinks is what it takes. That’s why it is hard.  Sometimes, it is also hard to see America because so many people are using the thoughts, spirits, and energies of others and not their own. 

The Spider Web

 Featured image: The Spider Web

In the corner of the porch attached to the cabin there is a huge gloriously, delicately designed spider web. The web’s design is only visible because the sun is high, lighting its delicate threads.

It’s interesting to think of webs that are created in real life. It is hard like the spider web when it isn’t highlighted by the direct sunlight to avoid them. We become trapped by them, like the spider’s captives. Wonderfully, most of the time we can free ourselves and try not to fall in to the same trap again.

Art Triggers Potential

 Featured image: Sunset at the Lake

Art is beneficial to the heart, mind and soul. How does this “beneficial-ness” happen? There are many perspectives on how beneficial-ness is accomplished. I wrote about two in my musing when I said that it was “a hope for a reward or fear of being different.” Is beneficial-ness created in hopes of a monetary reward, a social reward, or is beneficial-ness created by simple wonderful creativity and imagination?

I believe the latter. Intentions and objectives benefit many including the viewers of art and the artists themselves.

Art should be an unconstrained essence and happiness. Art is slowly losing this value. Art triggers all of our naturalness. Art is capable of touching all of our spirits, selves and souls, because of its diversities only if it remains unconstrained (controlled, governed).

Art triggers human potential in all of us but only if it remains unconstrained.

The Words I Say Everyday

 

Featured image: It's a Keeper

The words I say as I think to myself every day – every time I start a painting, every time I begin a musing – I am about individuality, and dreams and possibility.

Of course, when I paint and say these words to myself - my work doesn't always agree with me. But I try and I learn every time I create.

I Am

 

Featured image: Her Song - She Has Always Sang To The Tune Of A Different Drummer

 

I am a poet, philosopher, artist, 

Always, intimate, always searching

Always ragged around the edges

Always, alive, always passionate.

Process vs Product

 Featured image: Poppies and Roses

In your art, are you process or product oriented?  How you answer that question makes a big big difference in what you create.

Process involves you and who you are.

Product involves what others think you are and your need to have them think positively about you.

Process changes, evolves and grows.

Product changes with popularity.

Process involves independence.

Product does not.

Personal Visions

 

Visions personal

and intimate.

Visions often can

be linked to what we sense

and feel. A vision

happens before reason jumps

in and changes where

vision can play. Visions can

give you a personal

sense of how the world should work

Featured image: Visions Are Like Maps

https://christinealfery.com/products/visions-are-like-maps

Blow'n In The Wind

 Featured image: As The Wind Blows

I think of the Bob Dylan song when I think of creating yourself as a work of art – “The Answer My Friend is Blow’n In The Wind.” In order to be a work of art …. In order to create “you” you need to blow with the wind.

How many years will it be , how many years will it be before you can be yourself – and blow with the wind.

Narrow Path

Featured image: New Beginning Orchid Shoots

There can be no new

Growth if we do not remain

Open and vulnerable 

To what is new

Different, fresh, beginning,

Stepping into the

Unknown

Like a flower in a

garden

It Is Not Art

 

Featured image: Peacock

Abstraction : the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events. Freedom from representational qualities in art.

Abstraction, transcends, labels and forms. Abstraction begins naked. It is undressed.  When we can touch the naked work, the blank paper, the white canvas, then we become part of it and it is no longer naked. We, unfortunately, find a need to dress the blank page or canvas,. We label it and it is no longer abstraction, it becomes representational.  The beauty in abstraction is that it allows us to create a unique one-of-a-kind work that can be itself.
My art is that way, when I step away from the work it needs to speak for itself.  That is hard for me with most of my work, because I seem to always want to speak for it because I am so much a part of it. But, if it cannot speak for itself – then I believe it is not art. 

Transcendent

 

Featured image: Patchwork Landscape

Transcendent – Beyond or above the range of normal or merely physical human experience.  Existing apart from and not subject to the limitations of the material universe.

Is a soul or spirit transcendent? If so, how can it be imagined?  For me the soul, the spirit is something that is a loosely woven tapestry made of fabric, a weaving that has a lot  of gaps. A weaving of the transcendent is not stable. It is unstructured.  I imagine a weaving of clouds moving with the changing wind- not stable, sometimes transparent and sometimes opaque. So yes, I believe the soul or spirit is transcendent.  

Is this kind of transcendent divine like many famous philosophies claim,such as  Kant, Plato and writers like Emerson and Thoreau?  I don’t see it that way. I don’t know why, because their transcendence is based on the idea that romanticism is better than rationalism.  I do like their idea of transcendent being grounded in nature –  but this nature needs to be divine.

How do I imagine the transcendent?   Imagine a haze surrounding yourself, something like a sun dog surrounds the sun  because that implies a glow – a light. I like that imaginary and the weaving of the sun dog with the clouds.  Great tapestry – the soul and spirit of the transcendent – honestly – it is the imagined.

Struggling

 

Featured image: Struggling For The Soul

I frequently get asked the question - "How long does it take you to paint a work?"

My answer is always, "It varies."

This work, for example, began during the NWAT. That was six weeks ago. I have painted, repainted and changed colors. The concept behind the work even changed. I told folks during the tour that it was going to be a work of a friend of mine. It would be about rainbows, prisms and the color of the soul.

The whole concept of the work changed as I worked on it. And, I think one of the reasons that it was so hard to finish is because it exemplifies just about everything I write about the self. There is the grid - the computer grid in the face representing the mechanical and controlled, robot-like. Then, there is the on fire blaze emerging from her skull that wants to escape the grid and the control. The blaze is her spirit, her soul and it should belong to nobody but herself.

It is a very powerful piece for me. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I enjoyed and struggled with it.

Caw Caw

 

Featured image: Black Bird

The wind this morning

Hushed the delicate bird

Song black birds caw caw

 

Sky fades from black purple

Soft blue melts into golden 

Yellow, oranges, sunrise

 

Chorus rehearsing

Warming up new day begins

Cello song wind strings