Wasp

 

 

 “We have a belief that we need not believe in, no dogmas, no ritual, no mythology, no church, no priest, no holy book--what a relief!”
― Frederick Franck 

"Sea" shell ...?

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Ballpoint pen in 6x4" sketchbook. I don't remember if it came in a pack or I found it in the yard. Either way. I like how the back-lighting produced a glow you can see right through it, especially in the open end there. Wonder who made it home.

 

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"Once we start to draw, all of a sudden we begin to see again. Were we so blind? How could we have ignored the beauty, the intricacies of these 'simplest things' ... The moment the eye opens up, all becomes equally fascinating, equally inspiring, equally pregnant with meaning."
— Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing: Meditation in Action, Frederick Franck

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Starfish

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Back when I was married, there were magnets on the fridge. One was a starfish. One of its arms fell off, broke off. I drew a picture of it, evidently with an HB pencil, in an 8.5" x 5.5" sketchbook, on the 25th day of January, 2008. 

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"I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful." --John Constable.

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Made in the Shade: Main St.

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"The eye does not judge, moralize, criticize. It accepts ... the long bamboos being long, the goldenrod being yellow.”
― Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing

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"... classic poise ..."

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Slightly digitally enhanced version of pencil in 8.5" x 5.5" sketchbook, unenhanced scan below. The edit was an attempt to make up for the paint splatters ...
 

Study from a small photo in a magazine of Ryeui ryu karate kata champion Tsuguo Sakumoto. The likeness is not great, and it's all I had to go by for the subsequent black/white 20" x 16" oil painting(1996), so I gave up on that and just went for human-looking.

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"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." (Yogi Berra)

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Rita Drive, Garland, TX, '08

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Pencil in 5.5" x 8.5" sketchbook. A view from my 'studio' window, in those days.

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"We talk far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches.
 That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future –
all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would
 soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By
 contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face
 with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of ancient hills."--Goethe

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Granbury, TX, '02 ...

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... from a hotel balcony overlooking the lake.

 

 

Pencil in 9" x 12" sketchbook. I just recently got this one cleaned up the best I could, after curious children took a kneaded eraser to it. Understandable temptation.

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"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."  -Mike Tyson

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South on Carson

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 "The chief enemy of creativity is good sense" - Pablo Picasso

 

 

Sitting in the car outside J'boro City Water and Light, one day back in '86. Pencil in 5.5" x 8.5" sketchbook.

 

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C Kali Strong

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"I don’t really know whether art can exist without a certain degree of tranquillity or spiritual poise; without a certain amount of quiet you can have neither philosophy nor religion nor painting nor poetry. And as one of the specialties of modern life is to abolish this quiet, we are in danger of losing our arts together with the quiet of the soul that art demands." - Saul Bellow

 

 

Way back in the early 80s I was breaking in some new pens with refillable reservoirs, to accommodate colored ink. Doodle page in 5.5" x 8.5" sketchbook.

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"... flapping down the poisoned air, A ten-clawed monster."

 

"Science Fiction"
 by Kingsley Amis

 What makes us rove that starlit corridor
May be the impulse to meet face to face
Our vice and folly shaped into a thing,
And so at last ourselves; what lures us there
Is simpler versions of disaster:
A web that shuffles time and space,
A sentence to perpetual journeying,
A world of ocean without shore,
And simplest, flapping down the poisoned air,
A ten-clawed monster.

In him, perhaps, we see the general ogre
Who rode our ancestors to nightmare,
And in his habitat their maps of hell.
But climates and geographies soon change,
Spawning mutations none can quell
With silver sword or necrocmancer’s ring,
Worse than their sires, of wider range,
And much more durable.

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Plenty To Do

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"At 19, I read a sentence that re-terraformed my head: "The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang."
In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing - not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.
Each baby, then, is a unique collision - a cocktail, a remix - of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra's breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.
When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes - we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don't you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends. Don't you dare."
 - Caitlin Moran
hidden shores (via https://whiskeyriver.blogspot.com)

Wintoe

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"I don’t really know whether art can exist without a certain degree of tranquillity or spiritual poise; without a certain amount of quiet you can have neither philosophy nor religion nor painting nor poetry. And as one of the specialties of modern life is to abolish this quiet, we are in danger of losing our arts together with the quiet of the soul that art demands." - Saul Bellow

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the Ghooric Zone

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"The human species is too young to have beliefs; we need to stick with the questions." -- Anne Strieber

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Gimme Chocolate; my ekg's on the fritz.

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"...  Moreover, our efforts to awaken others to our notion of what reality is all about can often prove to be merely an additional impediment to both their as well as our true awakening. As the sage Siddharameshwar Maharaj noted: “What you are thinking of as ‘awake’ — some intense new passion for a worthy cause or a deep feeling of love for all existence — is actually the deepest of deep sleep, much deeper than a feeling of boredom or indifference. Yours is an intense association with the Illusion. The bored and the indifferent are on the verge of leaving the lure of the temptress Maya behind, no longer swayed by her shiny attractions. They are on the verge of waking.” "  --Conscious Process, Bob O'hearn

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Alien light

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"There are no correct experiences to have. The well-being we have sought by trying to rearrange thoughts, feelings and sensations is always and already present as the seamless flow of everything that arises."
~ John Astin

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Hmmm...?

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I was googling this: 

              "You'll see much more if you don't require to understand everything you see."

It's something I read somewhere decades ago, amongst material pertaining to the 'spiritual search,' and I thought I might find the long lost source of this assertion, perhaps explore the context, glean the meaning, figure out why it made such an impression all those years ago. The statement is clear as a bell in my mind, like it has it's own room in there; ain't goin' nowhere. But I can't remember where I got it. If you recognize it, please tell me about it in a comment. Eh?

So as the results page comes up my eye lands on this image and my mind recalls an old blog challenge where you answer a question with the first image that comes up when you google it. And this one even seems rather appropriate. Apparently it belongs to Darius Foroux. So, Darius, if you want me to remove this picture, let me know.

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Harmonious Inconsistencies

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The Carefree Dental Card appears to be a ripoff, American Water Resources has 221 complaints on the BBB website--and they are still, oddly, accredited--and there are no words that rhyme with "poetry." However...

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"As time goes by, especially in the last few years, I've lost the knack of being a person. I no longer know how one is supposed to be. And an entirely new kind of 'solitude of not belonging' has started invading me like ivy on a wall." - Clarice Lispector violent waves of emotion.
via whiskey river

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Interdimensional Barnacles...and Dogen

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“The coming and going
 of birth and death
 is a painting.

Unsurpassed enlightenment
 is a painting.

The entire phenomenal universe
 and the empty sky are nothing
 but a painting.”

~Dogen Zenji

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Art:  Interdimensional Barnacles, 24x36" oil on canvas, 2010, by me.

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East P'gould

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"I'm not lost for I know where I am. But however, where I am may be lost."
-A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

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We are all...

"We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day." - Brad Meltzer(via whiskey river)

Shirt on a hat on a bedpost

Dirty Harry on a tee shirt

 real donkey I met once