Think About Our Future

It is clear to me that one of the reasons I create art is to remind all of us that there is beauty in the world. Sadly and too often the events du jour result in the beauty being visible only in the minutia around us, but if we look hard enough it is still there to enjoy. Despite my positive intentions, once in a while I create an image that reflects a negative event that impact us globally. Here are two.

The first is titled White Radiation. You'd have to have your consciousness in a black hole not to guess that this is about the continuing leakage of toxic radiation emanating from Fukushima.

The inspiration for this piece came while working with a white Icelandic poppy that was covered in droplets of dew early in a recent morning. Just trying to make the glittering poppy shine on the screen the way it did in the garden somehow brought out this unsettling expression. The very thought of the radiation continuing unchecked is unsettling, so this works.

The second is one I created two or three months before the ginormous Gulf oil spill, courtesy of BP. Perhaps this was a premonition? (Dr. Leonard Shlain posits in Art and Physics that artists through the centuries have often expressed scientific theories before the scientists themselves posited them.)

It was inspired by shells I had collected on the beach just south of Santa Barbara, an area that itself was covered in oil in the 60s. Even though the oil company responsible cleaned up the beaches as best they could, ever since then globs of oil and tar befoul those once-pristine beaches anyway. Still, every time we walk there, we have to clean our feet or shoes with some other toxic element to get the smelly, gooey tarry stuff off. One can only wonder what it does to the health of wildlife, from the most tiny to the large. Having seen the continuing degradation of our California coast because of the continuing drilling and pumping, I shake my head in deep sadness about the Gulf's future.

The second is titled Think About Our Future. I sure wish that the leaders of governments and big companies would think more about that.

Choose Your News

   It’s very difficult to be an aware person in this current environment (double entendre intended) and not spiral, slowly or quickly, into a deep funk. So many things are wrong, sad, horrible, insufferable and worsening at every level of community. You know what I am talking about. Every time you turn on your radio, pick up a newspaper, or watch TV, the bad news drowns out all the other messages.

    Yesterday I heard a program on NPR in which the speaker was recommending, for people who are feeling burdened by the negativity going on, to just turn off the radio, take a break from reading the papers, eschew TV. He’s absolutely right. It’s a good start. But if you are still hungering to stay in contact with our culture and community, there’s more you can do and a clear way to accentuate the positive.

    You can choose Art for your connection. Art has the capacity to uplift and inspire no matter what or how it is communicating. And it doesn’t have to be old news – in fact, the conclusion of Dr. Leonard Shlain’s study culminating in his book Art & Physics (subtitled Parallel Visions In Space, Time & Light), is that artists through the ages have actually expressed new scientific theories before the scientists articulated them. The concept that there is a global consciousness is surely borne out by Art, which many of us understand as a behavior process of expression, not just a product or discipline.

    But there are even more important reasons to make Art an intrinsic part of your life, whether by creating it or observing it, or both. Three compelling reasons are:
      1. Art uplifts the spirit and inspires us.

2. Art informs our thought processes and gives us access to our own creative inventiveness.

      ...and last but not least...

3. It’s fun. 

                         
    What’s not to like about that list?

Note to image: These adorable little guys are hand carved chess pieces I brought back from my stay in India as a “foreign exchange student” in 1968 as a gift to my dad and as a thank you for opening my eyes up to the world. The chess pieces are ivory, which in those days we were woefully unaware as to the context of its existence and harvesting. That is another story. Having these players traveling from right to left and the happy atmosphere of the flowers makes me see them as going back in time to an earlier, more innocent time.