On an island in Panama with family, resting and discovering similarities and differences

... like these boats cayucos, hand hewn from single logs...

and the front fence of the local police station with the rocks painted a defensive black.

Golden Straw Light
for Solstice
by Laurie Seeman

Two Views of Life...

The Hudson River today looking from Newburgh towards Beacon

Is this art or healing?

In Delaware/Lenape Tradition: East is male, red, life, day, right-hand
West is female, black, death, night, left-hand


from Jung's Red Book

THIS DECADE'S ILLNESS

TO SEE:
Onion Report

THIS WEEK'S BOOK



Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White, Jr.
Examination of social changes as armed conflict shifted more to cavalry and hence the need for more land for to grow feed for horses... and more.
The point: we live in a very, very dynamic world. Snapshots of a the past are the best we can hope for and gawd help us if we use them as vision of the future.
I think McLuhan said: We look at the present in a rear view mirror

December 2, 2009

Just four months since the last tortured entry. What is a blog? Even with dear friends, smart friends, brilliant strangers, I get uneasy being escorted through their thoughts, arguments, wonderings, and analyses. I resist. I even resist my own blog--- just my turn to put the eye drops into someone else's eyes! Oh my gawd, even this is sounding like a BLOG! STOP

So, what I intend to do is share ingredients. I find things.
I find references, quotes, words, images, videos... all of which have a charge of some sort. They are the atoms of the imagination. If I wait for them to all pair up into molecules, then into compounds and finally into Flubber, all that sweet early, primal charge will be gone. What a loss!

So. I'll use this blawg as a shoebox, refrigerator door, hydrator for charged particles of the Imagination, for me at least. If they have a buzz for you, good.

BOOKS
I'm rereading Sylvia Brinton Perera's Queen Maeve and Her Lovers: A Celtic Archetype of Ecstasy, Addiction, and Healing.
I'm revisiting Edmund Carpenter's work: Eskimo Realities, They Became What They Beheld and more.

WORDS/TERMS
Inherent Vice: The tendency of material to deteriorate due to the essential instability of the components or interaction among components

SOMETHING TO SEE
That SandFantasy You Tube

ELSEWHERE

I'm still trying to figure out how a blog fits into the landscape of information. So here's this month's attempt.

Several Orange County (New York) artists met recently and found common interest in non-representational work... actually work connected to the roiling unconscious.

"So what!" you might be saying.

Well, Orange County is a rural, beautiful area-- home of The Black Dirt and luscious, seductive
vistas. After onions and apples, plein air painters are are biggest crop. So to, coincidentally, find a few other refugees from Landscape Painting was very exciting.

We are trying to find a regular time and place to keep meeting face-to-face. But until then and in addition to that, maybe a blog can help fuel and form all this. Here's my opening statement for this new/old group, Elsewhere:

I'm very interested in arts-in-action: artists composing areas in time and space, in color, shape and texture which beckon and entrance. These environment/encounters, when successful, are profound. People are not the same afterwards. They have recognized and welcomed home a wayward part of themselves. The artist is the helper/diviner of mildly lost souls. Artist as psychopomp.

For me, this is not done through traditional arts or crafts. That's why I left furniture for the world of Imaginal Artifacts. I want to use common materials, techniques and patterns as a way to elsewhere.

So I propose a "group" called, Elsewhere, which reflects and supports each others work in exploring the twilight and liminal areas. We can help each other devise ways to be bolder and braver about folding our murky works into the world.

The other two miscreants, at the moment, are Gloria Bonelli, Linda Richichi and John F. Simon, Jr

WELCOME!

In the many years I have been collecting and writing materials for this "book" - The Wayward Artist- I have been waiting for some opportunity to work in community with others waywardly touched.
E-mails are OK, but so one-to-one; we meet at Woodlander Gatherings. This year is the 18th; but that's only once a year. I don't yet know how Facebook might relate to this; and I suspect that Twitter is the junk food of communication.
But perhaps this blog can fill a void of casual, accessible interaction.

Who are Wayward Artists?

Probably all of us. We each need times and places to behave waywardly, just so we can survive.
But some of us are a bit more public and expressive about our errant ways. Wayward is an attitude, a way of honoring the unconscious... This image is titled Walking the Three Worlds by wayward David Horton.

I invite you to take a look at the materials I am freely putting onto the web, The Wayward Artist aka Hair on the Shower Wall and other creative opportunities. In the MAKERS section, I've begun to collect names of people who who seem to be in the same tribe. What do you think?

Let's see what kinds of common grounds we can find!

Daniel Mack