#260 Self portait

18x14 Acrylic on canvas board

#258 Water just over the hill, recurrent dream

14x18 acrylic on canvas board

#258 Gaza July 2014

9x12 pencil, ink, watercolor

#257 Gaza July 2014

#257 Gaza July 2014

#256

19x13 Acrylic on canvas board

Our disparate paths to truth...

I have to consider, that of those individuals who were most influential, most helped me to define the coures of my life, If I were to name them, among them, there would some who had a profound religious orientation (I say, orientation... not 'belief)'. This does not incline me to to adopt what they believed about their religion, but it leaves me open to an understanding... not of the content of their beliefs, but how, in some, those beliefs are so much a part of who they are--and that this has contributed to their being, for me... images of what it means to be human...in the best way.

No, I don't see their beliefs (or any such supernatural stuff) as necesary to being that kind of person--I've know those who are as materialist and alergic to supernatural explanations as I am--who are there with them... as examples of how to be human... or I should say, more than 'just' human.

But when you find such persons... I feel it important to accept all of what has contributed to their character... it being so rare, that I think, we would do well to be humble in our sense of intellectual superiority. Those few compassionate, fierce souls, the shape of whose lives have been carved in the struggle for justice, the creating of beauty--we need only accept them as comrades... as they would for us. No need to measure one another by our disparate pathes to truth.

Selfie

pencil scribble..

Gaza

I went to the protest in front of the Israeli counselate to day in Philly. I was happy to see so many protests world wide, but they aren't going to change anything. Israel has no conscience to appeal to . Those Israeli's who do, are effectively silenced. American Jews, who could make a difference, are hiding from the reality, unwilling to acknowledge the horrors that Israel has committed, and afraid to take a public stand. 70 years after the holocaust, nothing has been learned. Not even by those who have most reason to have learned.

Please read the comments, and add your own.

The Generative Engine of art is always hidden

Riffing off Levi Bryant "Deleuze's cinema books are only ostensibly about cinema. More profoundly they develop a materialist ontology (only visible if read with the first chapter of Matter and Memory). Those two volumes are where to look to find how art and philosophy can transversally resonate as described in What is Philosophy. When philosophy engages art it does not represent it, just as art that engages philosophy doesn't merely exemplify a philosophical thesis." And just as art doesn't "represent"... whatever its ostensible subject is. I like your idea of distinguishing between what is manifest, and the being of the object/machine... as a work of art is way more like a machine than a static object! The representation-- is its manifest reality, contingent on viewer, historical setting, cultural history etc. But the generative power is never exhausted in it's interpretations... in any of its manifest presentations. Those who would use art--turn it to propaganda, are keen to impose limits on that generative power and confine the work to --not necessarily a particular interpretation--it can be sufficient to assign it a place in an historical continuum, and from there, reduce ii to this or that political or ideological end. The criticism of the New Criterion is an example of this--at least in their treatment of American novels. One of the great things about 'outsider art'... and to the High Critics.. SciFi and fantasy are outsiders... that writers in these low brow modes can escape the Gatekeepers that have turned Establishment Literary Fiction into a wasteland.... perfectly comparable to the visual art of the 19c academies at the dawn of the Impressionists.

#253 Independence Day, the Ship of State

27x38 cardboard, roofing paper, scrap metal, acrylic on Masonite

On Being Authentic

How is it possible to be 'authentic?', like, you know... 'honest,' like it's all out there. It's never all out there for me. No matter how I try... or let go and don't try, you know... be there. There's always something left over, left out. Some feeling, some thought not included in whatever I've said or done. Comes back at me. Ah HA! Gotcha! You're not REAL! You're not HONEST! Look at all this shit left in the closet, the garbage bin... hiding...you are A FAKE!

That's what I am. I make it all up. I invent myself. Sometimes, what I want to be. Sometimes, what I want you to think I am. Sometimes, I don't have a clue. I just know, that I'm not real. And it wakes me up at night--stuff I've done that I'm ashamed of, or that is so powerfully stupid... I mean stuff I did 50 years ago! Comes back, says--if you did that shit, no WAY you can be anything but FAKE!

But there are people I love. I mean really. I would happily die for... and even if that's a little bit fake, and it probably is, I know I would act on it. And that wouldn't be fake. I would take their part. Stand by them.

That's how love heals. From the other side. Knowing that you can love. Are capable of love... even if you're a big fucking fake. Cause we're all fake... but love is real. Love is real... we immerse ourself, if only that we immerse ourselves... the waters rise around us, the measure of our mass. Of our elusive reality... never untainted, never without some remnant left out... but maybe that's how we go on? That part of us that refuses to join us... maybe that's ... our future self? What we are to become? That the only moment we will ever be wholly present, entirely real... is the moment at the end. When all is finished. The moment of our death?