Modern art 39: ARTSENSE 014

Acryl014. Hot summer landscape.

DETAIL 1


DETAIL 2


DETAIL 3


DETAIL 4


The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed, if interested click
show
___________________________________

Landscape painting in Western Europe appeared roughly around 1550 after the first gold and silver loated from South America started to circulate on the old continent. This period saw an incredible increase in means of payment that were put in circulation following the plundering of the treasures of the incas and other American societies. It's difficult for 21st century minds to imagine how big the impact of this plundering has been on European societies. What is for sure is that it changed the face of Europe and its future road.

For one, the ownership of immense material richnesses escaped the coffers of the religious hierarchy and orders. The immediate consequence of this central fact has been that the newly assembled private fortunes began spending lavishly on mansions and castles. The new rich wanted to show off their richnesses, bricks and stones assembled for eyes to see. This simple and basic economic reality engendered one of the most important cultural shifts in all the history of the European civilization. Private propriety, private ownership appeared indeed to shape the appearance of the individual in the other people's minds and thus the perception developed and generalized that individual well being was intimatelly related to material possessions. The cult of individualism was born that would ultimately overtake the cult organized by the church.This newly born individualism created the desire to acquire the symbols of religious power for private individual pleasure. The mansions and castles were a first shadowing of the cathedrals and palaces and once there, they had to be filled. Within the span of less than a century paintings, sculpures, mirrors, tapestries, rugs, and so on became all highly praised luxury commodities.
Those new rich wanted paintings representing the immediate environment of their mansions in a realist style at the image of the religious paintings that were hanging in the cathedrals and painters delivered thus for centuries in classical realism.

New technologies and the deepening of rationalism eventually called for the overthrow of the classical realist forms. Van Gogh, Gauguin, the impressionists, ... answered that call. Finally, after the 1st world war, painters wanted to overthrow the first degree reality given by our eyes. But what to put instead. Three quarters of a century later, this question has still not been answered satisfactorily.

My personal view is that visual arts need to go back to their founding "raison d'etre": representing the signs of our society's worldview in the making. "Hot summer landscape" is my vision of a landscape with its internal life and its external connections to the vaster world. This is surely not the representation of a first degree seeing. But seeing is far more than the image attained through the lenses of the camera or of the eyes. Seeing is that image + a lot more. It is not as if we were empty machines only seeing what our eyes-camera give us to see. Far from that. We are indeed the result of our culture, of our accumulated knowkedge and thus what we see is far more than the first degree image reflected in our eyes.
What we see is a visual perception by our complete being: camera-eyes + culture + knowledge + feelings.

Modern art 38: ARTSENSE 013

Acryl0013. Competitive growth.

DETAIL 1


DETAIL 2


DETAIL 3


DETAIL 4


The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed, if interested click
show
___________________________________

The urgence for more complexity is the strategic principal that life is tricked to follow for perpetuating and developping itself. This concept is recent for sure, we have indeed been more accustomed to hear about the tactical principle of competitive growth.

Life survival is based on the tactical principle of competitive growth and its development is based on the strategic principle of complexification.

In human life, we know for a fact that life preservation is based on the tactical principle of competitive growth to satisfy the need for:
- food and air for preserving the individual bodies.
- sex for preserving the specie.
Life development results from the urge for more complexity that results from the interaction between the tactical principle of competitive growth with the following interacting factors:
- the complexification of the structure and code of the individual bodies.
- the complexification of the social, economic and political systems.

Artblogs readers survey

A the behest of Todd Gibson from the blog "From the floor", a small group of art bloggers have been chatting via email, and have come to a conclusion. Site stats are great, but we don't know enough about our readers to be sure that we're writing what you want to be reading.

We're curious about several things. Why, for example, would you choose to be reading art blogs instead of watching Simpsons re-runs? Or are you reading art blogs while you're watching Simpsons re-runs? What sorts of content (reviews, opinion, art world gossip, pointers to articles in the mainstream press, etc.) do you find most valuable?

Here's the deal.

You give us five to seven minutes of your time and honest answers to a few questions about your preferences, and we'll give you sites that you'll enjoy reading even more than you already do. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

To participate (and you are participating, right?) follow this link and get to work. The survey will be online through October 11, 2004. I'll post a few of the more interesting findings when the survey is complete.

Modern art 37: ARTSENSE 012

Acryl012. Nature's urge for more complexity.

DETAIL 1


DETAIL 2


DETAIL 3


DETAIL 4


The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed, if interested click
show
___________________________________

I'm very much interested in the sciences of complexity, a multi dimensional approach towards knowledge. To be more accurate I should have written that it is a multidisciplinary collaboration in pursuit of understanding the common themes that arise in natural, artificial, and social systems and that the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an institution that was created as a new kind of scientific research community devoted to those sciences of complexity.

To me the most intriguing aspect of knowledge is how life emerged. This question has been at the centre of the philosophical debate of our Western civilization. Aristotle posited the question in the following terms:

"In all change, Aristotle says that neither the matter ("to hule") nor the form ("to eidos") comes into existence ("Metaphysics"). His point is that for something to change it must already be something, in which case the matter of the process of change pre-exists its change. In other words, that which changes, the matter, must already exist for it to be capable of change. The form is that into which the matter changes; as such, it likewise must already exist for there to be change. (That by which change occurs is the immediate mover.) Because change presupposes matter and form (and an immediate mover), the process of change will regress to infinity, because every change presupposes matter and form, which pre-exist the process of change. It follows that there must be a terminal point in the process of change: "Therefore there must be a stop" ("ananke de stenai") ("Metaphysics"). But this is not a temporal terminal point, because change or motion is eternal; rather it is a logical one. Aristotle holds it as an axiom that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes and effects, movers and the moved. That which is the logical starting point of infinite change must be an unchanging substance, causing change but not being subject to change."

Arriving at that point of his argument, Aristotle and in his footsteps all Western philosophers had only one recourse: god as the ultimate mover but I never could make myself follow this road. I always tought that the principle of change as being our reality at work would one day open for us a better avenue of understanding. At long last, I discovered the sciences of complexity that are opening a window on this understanding with the concept of emergence.
Those interested in this idea can go to my weblog THE air of the times and see the post titled Cold Sugar in Space Provides Clue to the Molecular Origin of Life dated September 25th, 2004.

When the idea of the emergence of unicellular organisms is established, how then to explain the evolution towards more complexity, towards we, humans?

It seems that starting with the emergence of uni-cellular organisms also called prokaryotes a code, the genetic code, has been inscribed in our dna, a chemical substrate that contains the order to incessantly search for more complexity. It seems as if life, the conscience of its preservation has been conditioned since the start by this need to go further, to stretch the limits.

That is the idea that I was thinking about when painting Nature's urge for more complexity.

Modern art 36: ARTSENSE 011

Acryl011. Sound waves.

DETAIL 1


DETAIL 2


DETAIL 3


DETAIL 4


The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed, if interested click
show
___________________________________

One of my preferred visual art forms are micro and macro photographies.
Micro photography zooms towards the infinitely small through the lenses of a microscope and macro photography zooms towards the infinitely large through the lenses of a telescope. Those images are generally stunning even if they are taken by scientists. Beautifull in visual terms and as intriguing as they might be, they represent images of our reality. Those interested to see some good scientific images can go to my weblog "The air of our times" and go to to the post titled "Science art of seeing" dated September 25th, 2004.

Here we discover that our reality is far wider than what our eyes give us to see. This should be an awakener for the proponents of realism in arts. The realists want first degree pictures at the image of what our eyes give us to see. But what our eyes let us see is only a tiny fraction of what there is to see. So their proposition is to limit our description to a tiny fraction of reality. In other words, they want us to stay in the past.
No thanks my friends, I want to be here today because what happens today gives me the instruments to see deeper and to better understand what reality is all about.

Art is the representation of the signs of that better understanding of reality. It always has been so and we have all interest to come back to that understanding if we don't want to remain stuck in total confusion.

A few months ago I saw a program on the net that transforms musical pieces into visual representations but I found the images very much unidimensional and very poor at meaning something. This, I guess, is what made me realize this "Sound waves". Those interested to see some "music images" can go to my weblog "The air of our times" and go to to the post titled "Graphical music notations" dated September 14th, 2004.

Modern art 35: ARTSENSE 010

Acryl010. In the realm of lofty thoughts.

DETAIL 1


DETAIL 2


DETAIL 3


DETAIL 4

The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed, if interested click
show
___________________________________

I postulate that the substance, the content of art works can only be the sense of reality as it forms in the times we live in. (the worldview or Zeitgeist in the forming today)

It has been so since the dawn of ages, from animism (primitive painting) to religious art (images about the story of the gods) to early rationalism (the new paradigm of private ownership and individuality.

This principle remains universally valid today.
But we went through a period of total confusion starting in the early 20th century about the question "What is art".

In the beginning of the 20th century, the avant-guarde affirmed that "the great prostitute was reason" but as Andre Masson wrote in 1941 in "Painting is a wager", ".. The tendency to allow oneself to be swamped by things, the ego being no more than the vase which they fill, really only represents a very low degree of knowkedge. In the same way, a casual appeal to subterranean powers, the superficial identification with the cosmos, false 'primitivism' are only aspects of an easy pantheism."

Our worldview or Zeitgeist is evolving fast and its evolution goes in sink with the discoveries of scientists and philosophers. In other words the only way out for artists, to be in the reality of this world and to appear as such for viewers tomorrow, is to represent the signs corresponding to today's knowledge base .

Thus knowledge is paramount for the artist. But the big question is how to represent the signs corresponding to this knowledge. I guess here is no universal answer. My personal approach is three phased:
- first phase is unconscient play with colors
- second phase is conscient discovery of sense into the result of the first phase
- third phase is visual harmonization. We should never forget the saying of Delacroix : "... a visual art work must first and foremost be a feast for the eyes".

Modern art 34: ARTSENSE 009

Acryl009. Wind and waves.

DETAIL 1


DETAIL 2


DETAIL 3


DETAIL 4


The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed,
if interested click
show
___________________________________

Flatland is quiet, the sun is blue and the leaves on the trees are immobile. This is a time of tranquility, time passes without ripples. Then for no explicable reason the air rises and soon swirls. Flatland vanishes, making place for a storm. Masses of air come and pass. The movement is clearly not regular. Now the sound is soft like a melancholic gypsi song but the next moment the rythm accelerates into a wild frenetic pounding on the chords of a skywide guitar. Bodies shake in awe. Trees are uprooted. Houses are flattenned. Then the wind quiets down for an instant as to take a full breath for blowing a new salvo more powerful than the last.

I have always felt that the rythm of the winds is like the rythm of life. Up, down, flat, unending change. You just can't stop it, better accept and adapt yourself to the rythm of reality and surf with it. Better never resist, you are powerless indeed. Let go and follow the movements, learn the dance and discover harmony in non resistance. Surfing the waves of live is acceptance of life, is discovery of the way of life. This is exactly what the Chinese masters at "shieyi" painting try to attain: the representation of the "way of life" of their subject.

Modern art 33: ARTSENSE 008

Acryl008. Concepts and signs

DETAIL 1


DETAIL 2


DETAIL 3


DETAIL 4

The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed,
if interested click slide-show
___________________________________

After meditation comes the sign. Having sensed reality we want to share our perception with the others around us. Generally words fail us and we recoursce to signs, simple mental images conveying the sense that we want to share.

In animist societies, shaman, men of knowledge were initiated by their benefactors to the art of seeing reality. With the help and under the influence of psychotrops, they learned to reach out to the ONE for gaining understanding of the working of the daily realities of their tribes. Their initiation was completed when they could enter into contact with the ONE at will at which time they used signs to share their worldview with the other tribe members. Carvings, paintings and decorations of those times integrate the signs of the worldview spread by the men of knowledge.

In the religious times of the gods, priests and monks were initiated to the creed that they would later preach to their brethren. The spreading of their worldview was realized through signs and words (manuscripts with illiminations), painted images, sculptures,...

In the early stage of capitalism, paintings are commissionned to represent the new notion of individual property. The new rich and entrepreneurial aristocracy want to adorn their walls with the local landscapes of their mansions and castles and also their portraits. Those paintings become the signs of their property and individuality.

By the end of the 19th century, the signs start turning to the individuality of the creator himself and by mid twentieth century we all had lost the meaning, the sense of what signs are all about.

Here we are now, entangled into this perplexing and troublesome situation of total absence of meaning. But I think that we should rejoice at the knowledge of our conscience of this absence. This is indeed I believe the point where, or should I say when, we start to search for the sense to give to nowadays signs and meditation is a great way to find ourselves and to make sense out of our reality and thus discover the signs of our times.

Changing wars

I received this message from one of my readers and I think my answer could interest others as well.

MESSAGE SENT THROUGH YOUR WEBSITE



name2 = amnah

replyemail2 =

YOUR_URL2 =

textarea = hi there, i'm very new to your blog.



I'm very interested on for blod dated on 29th july 2004,



The changing wars is an impressively outstanding work of art,



although the explaination for it is quite brief.Can you



explain more on this art? Thank you very much

Sincere thanks, Amnah, for the interest and the comments you express on my work.
I do not know if you read the content of my writings on my blog so I'll rapidly sketch for you my vision of art, its meaning and its function.


A RAPID SKETCH OF MY VISION ON ART, ITS MEANING AND ITS FUNCTION.

Since the beginning of mankind, as far as human history goes, art has been at the service of society. Art and most importantly visual arts served as diffuser of the worldview of society's "men of power and of knowledge" to the members of society at large.

- in animist times, shamans, sorcerers or whatever they are called were the ones who shaped the worldview of the members of the group. Their vision of reality was that the sun was at the heart of life, a male (yang) power of creation to be revered. Animals and plants used in daily life were respected for their human life maintaining power. Art served to illustrate those ideas. We moderns have come to call this form of art "primitive arts".... it flourished for tens of thousands of years.

- in religious times, I mean the historical phase of human development that comes after animism, humans revere gods (in the 3 religions of the word a unique god). The men of knowledge, in those societies governed by religions, are the priest, the monks or howerver they are called. They study the religious creed in their teens to diffuse it to all in their adult life. Art in that period describes the stories of the creed and gives images of the gods and their inner circle, angels,... Religious art flourished for hundreds and in some religions for thousands of years.

- starting with early capitalism in Europe around the 16th century, power in society will shift from the clergy to the new rich merchants and the entrepreneurial aristocrats. Richness in terms of gold and silver possessions are now what procures power, The search for more gold and silver will gradually shape a new worldview made of the ideas of material possessions, private property, individualism and rationality... By the end of the 15th century, art starts to represent landscapes and portraits and by the 16th and 17th century, those subjects represent the majority of all art productions. This will go on and on and is still true today for many people but something fundamentally new happenned in between.

- starting after mid-nineteenth century, I believe under the impact of new techniques of transportation introducing the notion of speed, some artists bring changes in their style of representation of portraits and landscapes. Vangogh, Gauguin are the best known precursors of this stylistic change. The impressionist movance, later the expressionists, the cubists, the futurists and other schools continue to depict portraits and landscapes, or to say this otherwise, they continue to depict reality or at least what is considered as being reality in their days. But sometime after the 1st world war, here and there artists begin to question the wisdom of that reality, they think, they write about the need to reject that vision of reality for something new. (Breton, Duchamp, Ernst, Miro, Masson, Chagall,...) This debate and trials at painting something different will go on from the 1930th without interruption until today. The approaches in creation after the 2nd world war can best be described as a search for individuality. Everyone tries something different, originality takes central stage and very fast "what has not been done before" becomes the sacred graal of artists. BUT in this process total confusion becomes pervasive. Everything has been called art, has it not, from a slashed canvas to a toilet seat.

- starting around the year 2000 (very arbitrary dating) some artists begin to express the need for SENSE in visual arts. Debates are going on but no firm conclusions have been accepted yet.

My personal conclusion is that art works have to return to their traditional function, the making of images that illustrate the worldview of present day "men of knowledge", the scientists and the philosophers if some remain. But we are not in times of art commissionning anymore, when the commissionner fixed the content of the art work. Today the artist has to come up with his own content. So I think that artists need to build up a strong base of knowledge in science and philosophy in order to be able to derive a good understanding of our reality. Their understanding is indeed the only possible valid subject of their art.
The present day worldview is fluctuating, we are on the road of shaping a new worldview but the images are still not very firm, or should I say not very firmly accepted. My painting is to be understood as an essay at rendering my vision of the forming of the coming worldview in post-modern societies. In other words, knowledge (scientific and philosophic) is what drives my image making.

Knowledge acts as a springboard for creativity, it projects a little further into reality and could redefine the artists and other free thinkers of the 21st century as the potential wisemen who first experience a global consciousness as a result of their integration of philosophical inquiries with scientific methodologies and data. But will artists size upon this opportunity? It is not a given fact, it requires indeed much humility, time and perseverance to reflect upon oneself and to study the mysteries of the sky, the earth and the self.
Notwithstanding those uncertainties, let's remember that art is something as the production of an expression or if you prefer an impression of the inner feelings and ideas of the artist. So we understand that an artist's productions are intimately related to his knowledge. The better his knowledge base, the better we can expect his production to be. Not advertisement of an ideology but expression of an idea, of a feeling through the use of a technique. In other words, content, the artist's personalized content will find central stage in artistic creation and beauty or ugliness will more and more relate to the content of a work!

It makes indeed no sense anymore in the twenty-first century to continue to photo-paint landscapes, people or whatever when we can simply use a camera, shoot a perfectly realist image and manipulate its pixels through a photo imaging software. It makes also no sense anymore to continue to illustrate the ideological trappings of religious or political half baked truths as it makes no more sense to plunge ourselves into the different distortions of reality as described by the twentieth century observers of the technological alterings of our visions of reality.

We the artists and free thinkers of the 21st century have to place the bar somewhat higher than that. Let's remember that those of us who are watching the image of the global village in the cosmic mirror are plunged into a whole new world vision that gives us in some way the means to cross the divide between our present day land of folly and the promised land of consciousness that sits across this bridge leading to the future. We artists have to cross this bridge, we have to go in the future but we should permanently remember that the parapets on the bridge are what is protecting us from falling into the absurd and we should remember that those parapets are made of solid knowledge...

About form.
I do not believe one instant that technical skills or mastery in one technique are automatically conferring artistic qualities. Saying that technical mastery confers automatically artistic qualities to a work would be like saying that physical beauty in a person is what makes a person beautiful. We all know that a beautiful person has a lot more to offer than her physical beauty. But let us not fall in the absurd, it is also clear that the absence of technical mastery will never allow a work to become a work of art on the merit of its content alone. We all know that an interesting person does not necessarily render a person beautiful but we all also know that an interesting person that is physically beautiful is undoubtedly a beautiful person. In other words, an artist has to possess some mastery in his technique in order to express himself with ease. How could one without technical mastery be able indeed to express himself unhindered? Mastery I believe has to be understood as the result of practice not necessarily of schooling because schooling without practice will never procure mastery. I furthermore think that mastery is the result of a process combining work, experience and personal internal maturation. From my personal experience, I deduct that content and technique have to be blend into art form. What I mean here is that whatever technique is being used to express whatever content, the resulting work must be harmonious. Harmony is indeed the general state of our universe, of our cosmos and as particles of dust that we are in our universe we can't but make do at the image of the whole that contains us. A work of art should thus reflect this harmony, this is not to say that a work of art must be beautiful, many things in our universe are not beautiful but they are always harmonious.

Here we reach the point of style. How to keep up with the harmony of our universe?
I discovered that "will", I mean this desire from the brain to reach something, is rigidifying. In other words, "will" is a reflection of our greed, of our desires. Greed and desires create disharmony thus reflecting them in our painting implies creating visual disharmony.
The only way I know of to keep harmonious lines, forms and colors is to let go all will, to accept what comes in full humility. Meditation greatly helps.

Here is the text that accompanies my painting "Meditation".
Meditation is accomplished in a context of retreat deep inside oneself, far from the noise of the world. It requires total relaxation of the body and absence of the mind.
The physical relaxation is the easy part. Stopping all thinking and forgetting about all accumulated knowledge and social bonds needs real humility and much patience.
After reaching total absence of the mind you are plunged back in the age of babyhood this is when you reach total innocence.
Total innocence frees the links between yourself and the whole of our universe. You are now in contact with the ONE, you are part of it and everything shines with clarity.

In light of this, coming back to "Changing wars", my motivation goes as follows.
I feel deep anxiety about our contemporary video game wars. Children are growing up with the same video games that are used by soldiers on the battle ground.
This is no joke!
Playing to kill and killing resulting from a keyboard stroke, what a monstruosity!
What frightens me most is the distance that has been introduced between the soldier-player and his victims.
"Changing wars" is about my vision of technologically changing wars: strikes that run through cables or surf on waves while the actor of those strikes sits confortably at his desk... What I depict is my impression of a very complex system, the one we live in. Our system I feel has reached the tilting point of "singularity", when the complexity is such and the speed of change is such that we just can't even imagine any more what comes next. The danger that I imply is to see future worldwar massacres brought on us by this distance between the act of typing on a keyboard stroke and its consequences.
I hope I succeeded in rendering this complexity, the singularity it leads to and this danger of non-conscience that could lead eventually to the absolutely worst man slaughter in all our history.

Modern art 32: ARTSENSE 007

Acryl007. Meditation.

DETAIL 1


DETAIL 2


DETAIL 3


DETAIL 4

Meditation is accomplished in a context of retreat deep inside yourself, far from the noise of the world. It requires total relaxation of the body and absence of the mind.

The physical relaxation is the easy part. Stopping all thinking and forgetting about all accumulated knowledge needs real humility and much patience.

After reaching total absence of the mind you are plunged back in the age of babyhood this is when you reach total innocence.

Total innocence frees the links between yourself and the whole of our universe. You are now in contact with the ONE, you are part of it and everything shines with clarity.

Modern art 31: ARTSENSE 006

Acryl006. Black hole.

DETAIL 1


DETAIL 2


DETAIL 3

A short scientific presentation:

"""A black hole is a region of space that has so much mass concentrated in it that there is no way for a nearby object to escape its gravitational pull.

Suppose that you are standing on the surface of a planet. You throw a rock straight up into the air. Assuming you don't throw it too hard, it will rise for a while, but eventually the acceleration due to the planet's gravity will make it start to fall down again. If you threw the rock hard enough, though, you could make it escape the planet's gravity entirely. It would keep on rising forever. The speed with which you need to throw the rock in order that it just barely escapes the planet's gravity is called the "escape velocity." As you would expect, the escape velocity depends on the mass of the planet: if the planet is extremely massive, then its gravity is very strong, and the escape velocity is high. A lighter planet would have a smaller escape velocity. The escape velocity also depends on how far you are from the planet's center: the closer you are, the higher the escape velocity.

Now imagine an object with such an enormous concentration of mass in such a small radius that its escape velocity was greater than the velocity of light. Then, since nothing can go faster than light, nothing can escape the object's gravitational field. Even a beam of light would be pulled back by gravity and would be unable to escape.""" (Citations by Ted Bunn)

"""Black holes are thought to form from stars or other massive objects if and when they collapse from their own gravity to form an object whose density is infinite: in other words, a singularity. During most of a star's lifetime, nuclear fusion in the core generates electromagnetic radiation, including photons, the particles of light. This radiation exerts an outward pressure that exactly balances the inward pull of gravity caused by the star's mass.

As the nuclear fuel is exhausted, the outward forces of radiation diminish, allowing the gravitation to compress the star inward. The contraction of the core causes its temperature to rise and allows remaining nuclear material to be used as fuel. The star is saved from further collapse -- but only for a while.

Eventually, all possible nuclear fuel is used up and the core collapses. How far it collapses, into what kind of object, and at what rate, is determined by the star's final mass and the remaining outward pressure that the burnt-up nuclear residue (largely iron) can muster. If the star is sufficiently massive or compressible, it may collapse to a black hole. If it is less massive or made of stiffer material, its fate is different: it may become a white dwarf or a neutron star.""" (Citations from Expo/Science & Industry/Spacetime Wrinkles by The University of Illinois)

In my vision, the colapse of a star is like the succion of a vacum cleaner that would be the size of the star itself and everything is like glued, at the core of the star, unable to escape.

Modern art 30: ARTSENSE 005

Acryl005. Water chemistry.

DETAIL 1


DETAIL 2


DETAIL 3


DETAIL 4

"Water plays an important role as a chemical substance. Its many important functions include being a good solvent for dissolving many solids, serving as an excellent coolant both mechanically and biologically, and acting as a reactant in many chemical reactions. Blood, sweat and tears... all solutions of water".

Many fundamental particles were formed in the big bang, including the basic building blocks of all atoms: protons, neutrons, and electrons and also the two lightest elements, hydrogen and helium. Some heavier elements were created in the Big Bang, but only in trace amounts, the heavier elements, such as oxygen were synthesized during the evolution of stars.

"Stars like our Sun produce in their hot cores. Stars contain mostly hydrogen. The pressure and temperature is so great in the core that hydrogen is fused together to form helium. Since the mass of helium is less than that of the hydrogen necessary to create it, energy is released according to Einstein's formula: E = mc2, where E is the energy, m is the difference in mass, and c is the speed of light. 90 per cent of a star's lifetime is spent fusing hydrogen into helium. Once the hydrogen is used up, helium begins fusing and one of the by products of that process is oxygen. Depending on the mass of the star, all the heavy elements up to iron can be created in succeeding fusion reactions or nucleosynthesis ."

There is strong evidence that life on earth appeared in a body of water. Water dissolves or emulsifies other life-supporting substances and transport them to intercellular and intracellular fluids. It is also a medium in which reactions take place. Reactions provide energy (non-matter) for living. Energy causes changes, and manifestation of changes is at least related to, if not the whole, life.

Citations are from H20 - The Mystery, Art, and Science of Water. Chris Witcombe and Sang Hwang of Sweet Briar College.

Modern art 29: ARTSENSE 004

Acryl004. A transformation..

DETAIL 1


DETAIL 2


DETAIL 3


DETAIL 4

Harmony is the general state of our universe, of our cosmos that's why we call it the prevailing harmony. It is not something static, all the contrary, it is permanent change. It is transformation from one state to another state.

These last centuries, western artists and thinkers concentrated on the idea of an absolute truth. They lost themselves in this sisyphean act of the snapshot FOR truth leading more often than not in the deap valley of certainty where they drowned under the passions arising from those very certainties.

We should now make the jump to a superior level and discover how to fabricate snapshots OF truth.

As I understand it, visual artists have a mission and this mission is to give a visual representation of the "Zeitgeist", of the vision of reality in the forming in society at large. Such has been the role of artists under animism, under religions and under early capitalism, in other words from the beginning of mankind until sometime at the end of the 19th century. Since then much confusion has flowed in artistic waters. This ARTSENSE serie is all about the sense of visual arts at the down of the 21st century.

I firmly believe that to keep in tune the princips of life at work throughout our cosmos, we have to concentrate on the sequences between the snapshots while freeing our SUBJECTIVITY of our greed and glory driven ego. For the observer, the sequencing of changes is what ultimately is making sense of each particular moment. The same goes for the art observer. It is indeed the sequencing of changes between colors, between sounds or between ideas and words that ultimately makes sense of those same colors, sounds, ideas and words.

Here lies a unique chance to leave the heights of our past searches for certainties. By their very nature, changes don't let us the time to focus on certainties, indeed, the best we can do is to try to surf on the waves of changes, to try to be IN the reality of the situation or to say this otherwise, to try to be in the reality of each moment.

In this painting, I represent my vision of the transformation of material particules and gases into energy.
We humans are the result of an extremely large mass of such kinds of transformations, from gases to material particules to uni-cellular organisms to multi-cellular organisms leading to the very complex beings that we are, humans and other 'animals'. But we should alsways remember that our stage of evolution as complex beings is only one moment on the time scale of our universe. As such, we are thus bound to be transformed further down the road and eventually to disappear one day....

Make no mistake, an image is not a scientific explanation. An image only gives the representation of the artist's vision of reality that he intents to share with his contemporaries. Now, for this vision to make sense, for this vision to have an impact upon society, the artist better have a good culture, a vast acquired knowledge base. This is in essence the message that I convey in the book that I write in parallel with my ARTSENSE series of acrylics.