The year 2002 is ready to leave. This numerical sequence won’t happen again for a thousand years. What will the world be in 3003? While the future is intoxicating, awareness of the present moment is the key to understanding both the past and what is to come.  The answer is found in things transcendental, things mysterious and as yet unexplained, things beyond thought, ideas, and concepts—a nursery where creation has its place.

“I do not propose to write an ode to dejection,
but to brag as lustily
as chanticleer in the morning,
standing on his roost,
if only to wake my neighbors up.”

—from the cover of Henry Thoreau’s book, Walden

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As the new year beckons, it’s a great time to see whether there is anyone living inside you that you respect. Have you made the grade? Or, did you sell out? Only you know the answer. Sure there are pressures, obligations, and a variety of obstacles that block your way toward character. If you don’t feel good about you, then who will? And even if someone else does feel good about you, without your inner self made strong, your soul withers, and you live on to count the days, not create them.

Be hearty and strong of will. Do not be glib about your own self. Fortune favors the brave.

Happy New Year!

Note: If you want to know more about selling out, read Kafka and I in the writing section inside the main site gallery.

"Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing which will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent. You are loath to let compromise or the threat of danger hold you back from striving towards the summit of fulfillment.”

—John O?Donohue,
Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World

Note: If you want to know more about art and soul, read Divine Fire in the kül cha section inside the main site gallery.

"Art is magic. So say the surrealists. But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality. In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic. To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction. Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.”

—Hans Hofmann, from Search for the Real

Note: For more about what makes magic in art, see My Artist’s Statement inside the main site gallery.

"I was returning, immersed in thought, from my sketching, when on opening the studio door, I was suddenly confronted by a picture of indescribable and incandescent loveliness. Bewildered, I stopped, staring at it. The painting lacked all subject, depicted no identifiable object, and was entirely composed of bright color-patches. Finally, I approached closer and only then recognized it for what it really was—my own painting, standing on its side on the easel.”

—Wassily Kandinsky

The painting in question was, as I recall, of haystacks, not the detail of the painting shown above. I cropped this section from Kandinsky’s art painted on glass from an insightful book by Annegret Hoberg called Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter that chronicles their ill-starred love affair. Prestel Publishing