What is the matter with art /
What is art - why is it people pay so much for some of it, seek it out and adore it.. although it is not at all necessary, not very useful and often very strange. What made Victor Hugo write in the Les Misérables — 'The beautiful is as useful as the useful...Perhaps more so.'
People have asked me if art is just marketing? And i don't know. I know that i have spent so much time in and around paintings and maybe lots of my own particles are physically art. All i know is that within the frame of a painting - there is nothing but a beautiful dream, there's no money, no politics, no conflicts, no guns, no meat or diamonds, no worries about gold and jewelry, possessions, bodies flow in and out, adorned or not, simple chairs are beautiful, carpets and faces are beautiful, the world is mysterious and extends far in the distance into the mists and fogs of paint. It is a delightful place, the world of a painting.
Here is a poem i wrote:
What is in a Picasso print, what transpires in a B.C. marble, what is in a Vatican fresco and a Dying Slave? What's the Black in a black Goya painting, what's eating us in a Bosch, where is the De Kooning woman going on her bicycle, which anonymous artist painted the thousand hands of this Shiva? Why does Monet shimmer, why is that man with an apple for a face, how many birds do you see in an Escher, why is the triangle of light in Rembrandt so mysterious? Where is the light in a Vermeer coming from, why are there 500 species of flowers in a Botticelli, why am I going around in circles trying to find out where the wind is coming from that is blowing these cypresses, and why is mouth and flesh in a Bacon so maddeningly beautiful? Why is art so beautiful?
A Morning when i am drawing /
Love Japan and everything in it /
Leonardo da Vinci's diaries in their full digital glory /
Become Your Dream /
Never stop dreaming, New York /
A favorite book that i used to eat with the covers and color in the black and white illustrations - illustrated by my favorite artist - 150th Anniversary Edition of “Alice in Wonderland” Features Rare 1969 Salvador Dalí Illustrations. /
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/09/salvador-dali-alice-in-wonderland-illustrations/
Better than the whole Spider-Man movie franchise...narrated by David Attenborough /
How to fix it in 10 easy steps /
I have identified 10 easy steps that we, together, can fix this country.
And number two is...
2. Eliminate the shopping cart ( except for disabled people of course ). You get whatever you can carry.
CHA104.0001.xxf1rw (MODEL RELEASED IMAGE) The Aboubakar family of Darfur province, Sudan, in front of their tent in the Breidjing Refugee Camp, in eastern Chad, with a weekÕs worth of food. DÕjimia Ishakh Souleymane, 40, holds her daughter Hawa, 2; the other children are (left to right) Acha, 12, Mariam, 5, Youssouf, 8, and Abdel Kerim, 16. Cooking method: wood fire. Food preservation: natural drying. Favorite foodÑDÕjimia: soup with fresh sheep meat. /// The Aboubakar family is one of the thirty families featured in the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats (p. 56). Food expenditure for one week: $1.23 USD. (Please refer to Hungry Planet book p. 57 for the familyÕs detailed food list.)
Ottersland Dahl family, of Gjettum, Norway (outside Oslo). Gunhild Valle Ottersland, 45, shopping for weekly groceries. Model-Released.
Bhu.mw.01.xxsNalim and NamgayÕs family of Bhutan, with all of their possessions. From pages 72-73, Material World. The family of subsistence farmers lives in a 3-story rammed-earth house in the hillside village of Shingkhey, Bhutan. {{Family members are: Namgay (50, family patriarch and husband of Nalim), Nalim (47, family matriarch and wife of Namgay), Kinley (17, son of Namgay and Nalim), Bangam (also called Kinley, 14, daughter of Nalim and Namgay), Zekom (2, daughter of Nalim and Namgay), Sangay, (29, daughter of Nalim and Namgay and wife of Sangay Kandu), Sangay Kandu (33, husband of Sangay), Choeden (9, daughter of Sangay Kandu and Sangay), Chato Namgay (7, son of Sangay Kandu and Sangay), Sangay Zam (5, daughter of Sangay Kandu and Sangay), Chato Geltshin (3, son of Sangay Kandu and Sangay), Tandin Geltshin (2, son of Sangay Kandu and Sangay), Kinley Dorji, (61, unmarried brother of Nalim). Nalim and her daughter Sangay work as partnersÑthey take turns caring for the children and working in their mustard, rice, and wheat fields. SangayÕs husband Sangay Kandu does the plowing of the family fields but Sangay and Nalim do the planting and harvesting. Namgay, who has a hunched back and a clubfoot, grinds grain for neighbors with a small mill his family purchased from the government. They are paying for the mill as they canÑoften the payment is made in grain and mustard oil. Namgay is also a reader of sacred texts and conducts house cleansing and healing ceremonies for their 14-house village. From Peter MenzelÕs Material World Project that showed 30 statistically average families in 30 countries with all their possessions.}}
The Material World books changed my life and how I see the world and i could never unsee the photographs in them - they were done before google gave us insight into people's lives. I always found it very weird and felt overwhelmed by the amount of stuff we have in stores - they say the average amount of products in your average grocery store is 40,000 items. The normality of this escapes me - to quote the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"Five to one against and falling..." she said, "four to one against and falling...three to one...two...one...probability factor of one to one...we have normality, I repeat we have normality." She turned her microphone off—then turned it back on, with a slight smile and continued: "Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem."
Hungry Planet:
http://menzelphoto.photoshelter.com/gallery-collection/Hungry-Planet-Europe/C0000k7JgEHhEq0w
Material World:
Cats with plans - for world domination - today in your metro station, tomorrow - world. /
my favorite #scifi #shortstory i have discovered thanks to #reddit - the egg and meat. Meat?.. Meat. Meat?? ... Meat. /
my favorite #scifi #shortstory i have discovered thanks to #reddit : the egg
and meat?
how to fix it in 10 easy steps. And number one is... /
I have identified 10 easy steps that we, together, can fix this country. And number one is...
1. We get rid of all couches, better yet - throw them out together with all televisions. What's with the couch you say, poor thing hasn't done a thing against this nation.
The thing with the couch is easy - every second we spend on the couch we are not spending chasing our dreams. Or biking our neighborhood or talking to our neighbors or making extra cash for the trip around the world we have been dreaming of.
The dynasties of the world love the couch because when we are chained to it we are easily seduced to live vicariously through other people's triumphs. They setup various circuses like politics, olympics and reality shows and thus inject us with the emotions and experiences of people we have never met.
The added bonus of selling the couch is now we can do cartwheels in the living room and probably wholelotta more fun stuff without fearing falling off the lumpy..
Darth Vader Dress - Hand Painted Acrylic on Canvas /
This bust at the Met /
Jupiter Down Under /
Everything I ever dreamed of as a kid, all the Isaac Asimov novels with all the wonders of the universe in them. We need to know how great it feels to be explorers - because it feels so much better than setting up wars isn't it. I dream of a time in the future when even the gloomiest schmuck of a politician will get up in the morning and the first thought in their brain would be something good, something grand and something far away.
All our dreams are becoming a reality, today in our solar system but who knows what tomorrow will bring. I'd imagine once a new propulsion is invented we'll be hopping planets the way we do continents today. All the new dreams will, by necessity, replace the old needs for greed, violence and war.
Remember when Asimov talked about silly machines that answer questions in every home. I have a weird dream where overnight all purses become little models of space ships, all Ikea stores wake up as independence day like huge alien crafts just awoken from slumber - when they start rising and shaking - all kinds of particle board furniture starts falling off into big heaps... and humanity wakes up to a future without a need for furniture.
..
Jupiter’s North Pole Unlike Anything Encountered in Solar System:
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/jupiter-s-north-pole-unlike-anything-encountered-in-solar-system
Jupiter Down Under:
http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia21032/jupiter-down-under
Grandpa was a Macedonian from a village in modern day Greece, 6 miles from Pella - the birthplace of Alexander the Great. He was like the Old man and the Sea... /
Grandpa (in the middle) grew large tomatoes, made the most amazing fishcakes and had the stretchiest house on the Black Sea with the ever growing amount of people it was able to fit. He was a Macedonian from Bozets (Бозец), modern day Athyra (Άθυρα) in Greece. He always said a Macedonian soldier never turns back, only 180 degrees and forward.
