on justice

it has never left my attention that justice is the third part of this set. truth, beauty and light or and the good would have made a kind of sense. justice speaks to ethics. i have been focusing my pursuit of creating art in the idea of the sacred. and i can see how i have been of a certain abstract sort of comprehension, where justice begins the approach into the political. it makes sense to me now. and my sense of what is just is based in this pursuit of the sacred. society must be just. that seems to be how it should be written, to my senses. relativity does not remove the question of what is just in society. wealth is part a measure of how a society pursues justice for its citizens. what is wealth? how much wealth does society need? what about wealth and power? what is power in regards to society? nobody really rides above the society self generating energy and material wealth. this should be how we measure economic justice. our political rights require our commitment to economic justice, including the lessons of the past for society in regards to welfare programs. the apparent fact that labor is being left out of trade treaties and how companies pursue the bottom line would then be evidence of a lack of what is just. nobody who employs thousands can disengage their own life from the life of the masses. it just does not make sense and is known to have historical ramifications. we should indeed be leery of those seeking great piles of wealth. we should always be regarding the level of live-ability in regards to everyone in society when considering what is an acceptable definition of wealth.

what is government but humanities effort to organize and pursue what life is? what is life? i say humans will always organize and begin to work together. that seems to be a law of nature to me. and so we have to then ask how should we organize? what does history tell us about how humans have organized in the past? why did we end up with the declaration/constitution we ended up with? what is its purpose?

aum

i was thinking about the other side of the banner I made for this show, my usual, a cloudstickpeople piece. it is basically itself a tryptich, although actually it is one painting. i guess a tryptich can be a scene so then it is part of a double tryptich. it is a secret double tryptich as the painting may never really be displayed. or it could be displayed further away from a wall. the secret is not really a secret by design though. as a title it has a ring to it and as long as the painting side is turned it is like a secret. as a double secret tryptich it is also a great symbol for my painting as much of my work could be called 'the secret life of clouds'. we live in the times when all secrets will be revealed. i am pretty sure i heard or read that in some indigenous writing. probably native american but possibly world indigenous. my lax recall is probably due to the fact i read alot but don't document beyond folding corners and paper markers. but it makes alot of sense. you know, there was a white calf in wisconsin i believe recently which was a big omen to certain tribes. this follows the idea of secrets revealed as this brings great portend. in these great portend we could say is our opportunity to learn about life and who we are as creations. we are 'in God's image' so what does that mean. and just what god is being invoked as there are many.

i have also realized what i am trying to say with these mandalas which are not dna reflectors (see the blog thebiggreenpea nearer the beginning of the blog, possibly in the archive). they operate on the same design as this later set which is essentially a sacred art way. i recently encountered the idea of consciousness resonance units. that is not the correct phrasing exactly but it led me to a conclusion that each mandala is in a sense the point of an infinite field of resonance. my guide is the ideal and the ultimate. the platonic form realms and dimensions. resonance as light and even as sound. i invoke sound as color and light do have their audio as well. each mandala is also a whole song or symphony. and then as a tryptich, what field has been set up with these three ringing as one?

as for sound and clouds i will suggest a study of aum.

from the show "walking the path" held December 12, 2008 at a place called st. gregory's, our friend joe's studio space, here in chicago. it was great fun of a show for me and many. the big challenge had to do with the dutch ceilings. i needed to secure each mandala to something and a banner was the most obvious solution. the flip side is a painting of a cloud.

i was just snooping through my snapfish account and ran across this photo. i showed this piece last year about this time. not many people came to the show but i was able to put up this set and quite a few other pieces.

truth

truth

frithjof schuon discusses the idea of the esoteric where religions which occur temporally or in time do not really contain truth in such a way they can deny access to any other or outsider. in the transcendent is where God resides or is and that experience is outside the dome of the 4th dimension or time. at a certain point in my life my attention turned to the constitution and declaration. a result perhaps of spiritual growth or development which turned my ego attentions from consumer to citizen. this includes the understanding we can create spaces where people can have truly transcendent experience. as a citizen i began to wonder what i could do as an artist as my field was of the intuition. then i noticed the rhetoric coming from the right wing in america guided by their interpretation of their own holy scripture and i noticed the true legal threat they presented to me and my love.


this is all an attempt to flush out the context or the environment which birthed this set as they all really begin as a point or circle. many of the ideas form around and reveal themselves as i finish each piece. we live in an intellectual environment where truth and ultimates have been deconstructed...i often consider then can one know truth? this set is also my answer to that question. much of human learning and history convinces me my intuition is correct and there is in fact a design and there is truth. there is truth and there is beauty...

beauty

beauty



when i began the mandala i began with an idea to portray the face of God. rather, the idea of the infinite faces of God so one face. each mandala began then in that early phase just as an attempt to portray these ideals. really, ideals can be seen as ways to know or understand this God. beauty to me seems a definite resonance of a way to see God. beauty, harmony, balance...justice.

justice

justice



a part of the story of this piece, justice, includes of course the period of time the series itself covers. the series began the tuesday after 9-11. this timing may be pure coincidence as my own direction without 9-11 was towards this set. perhaps it is all a part of some strange attractor event. justice itself is a piece which may address the question of the boddhisattva and the political. for me spirituality just started to resonate to resemble the life which is engaged both with spirit and creation and society. also, in 2000 i witnessed what to me as well as many other observers seemed to resemble a theft or type of coup so our antennas were already at alert. there was a clear design to the possible threads which connect many events and turns through these past 8 years. clear lines of logic connect pnac to 9-11 to the iraq war and the patriot act and bill o'reilly. i throw him in partly for comic relief but partly because of his apparent defense of the patriot act through a blatantly false accusation about the possible years of obama. he threw the patriot act on to the end of a list of liberal infraction - right wing talking points. this is also a way to connect the media in to the whole knot which has become the state control mechanism. o'reilly will now play the part of bad boy patriot to the same degree of absurdity he kissed the neo-con behind. there is no end to the depths of denial in response to such accusations yet the point i am trying to make about media and total propaganda still stands.



the image of justice is as balanced scales blinded. with this in mind we have an idea how to proceed in our attempt to model this ideal of justice. we feel that in this current world dynamic there is less justice than our ideals would require. there are also clear violations and continued attempts to usurp legal traditions and systems of laws. part of this again is the total propaganda campaign where citizens must acquiesce. total belief systems limited by limited access to information. america exists outside these very restrictive demands of totalitarian systems and this is one temporal secular interpretation of the meaning of justice which informs the declaration and constitution of the united states.