Organic art = the patterns of life (2)

1. The nature and function of art over the last tens of thousands of years


In my last article I wrote “ Life is a rare gift in the universe but our power societies, and more particularly the quasi-worldview of Modernity, lost touch with this evidence. Now that we start to grasp the fact that this gift could be taken away we come to appreciate that it is the most precious thing we ever had. ”

Since the principle of life is the most important thing we ever had would it not be logical to derive all our ideas and actions about how to live from this principle ?

The first question that arises is then ‘what is life? ‘.

Organic Art = the patterns of life (1)

I terminated the digital variations of painting 1-03 of the "grand project".

Here follow some samples and some initial commentaries.


Check the entire collection of all 256 digital paintings here.

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What’s going on here ? (6)

3. determinant factors driving the ‘governance-world’

Present post:

- Societal atomization
- Creeping totalitarianism
- Western illusions
- The West has no clue about China's strategy
- The West is setting itself up for a rude awakening
- The empire loses its clients

My next post

... I'm taking 2 months off ...
The next post in this series will appear on  Friday 2019-09-06:
4. the grand convergence of all the side-effects of Modernity
__________

What’s going on here ? (5)

2. the cultural context forces human thinking and actions

The present post covers:

-  chapter 2.3.   Culture
-  chapter 2.4.  Collision of our cultural context with societal collapse

Next week’s post will cover:

-  chapter 3. determinant factors driving the ‘governance-world’

What’s going on here ? (4)

2. the cultural context forces human thinking and actions


The present post covers:

-  chapter 2.2. Societal worldviews


Next week’s post will cover:

-  chapter 2.3. Culture

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What’s going on here ? (3)

2. the cultural context forces human thinking and actions

The present post covers:

-  the introduction of this part 2

-  and its first chapter 2.1. Axioms of civilizations.

Next week’s post will cover:

-  chapter 2.2. Societal worldviews 
-  chapter 2.3. Culture 
__________

What’s going on here ? (2)

1. Pragmatism versus ideology

I’m foremost a thinker and a painter And I want to make clear from the get go that painting does not happen in a void. You certainly withdraw to a certain extent from the societal noise. But the societal noise is never far away and it somehow always finds a way to creep back into your mind. So the mind is never really totally detached from what is going on in human affairs. And so, whatever the views of the artist about what art is all about, the fact of the matter is that the act of painting itself can’t avoid to be tainted by what is going on around the image maker. In other words art is not a think on itself. Art is an integral part of societal life. And once this idea is firmly ingrained in the mind “art for art’s sake” appears for what it truly is: an aberration.

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What’s going on here ? (1)

The disorder in the world of human affairs has been rapidly accelerating since the publishing of my book “A growing disconnect between East & West”.

At the time I concluded with the following observations:

All 256 digital variations of 1-02 are now online

The complete gallery, with all 256 digital variations of painting 1-02  from "the grand project", is now available here.

All 256 digital variations of 1-01 are now online

The complete gallery, with all 256 digital variations of painting 1-01 from "the grand project", is now available here.

Digital variations of oil paintings

I had been playing with various fractal apps in the early 2000’s and marveled shortly at the wild gyrations on the screen. But I rapidly started to feel uneasy with the machine like perfect outcome of those works. Such a perfection in my eyes appeared to be devoid of life characteristics such as the flaws that litter the path taken by the process of constant transformations that life is all about. In the case of a visual sign such flaws of life can take different forms like an imperfection in a line indicating an accidental move of the author’s hand. I always felt that the absence of such signs of life deny human craft qualities to these works. And this is how I started to experiment diverse methods to digitally transform photographs of my paintings. In 2006 I terminated 12 digital variations of each of the 40 acrylics in my acrylics “artsense” series. This gave 480 digital variations that were edited as very short limited edition prints. These works can be viewed here.

I later summed up my feelings about what I see are the main differences between fractals and digital transformations in the following posts:

The War With China is Already Under Way

"The only acceptable status for China is as a distinctly lesser power. To ensure such an outcome, administration officials insist, the U.S. must take action on a daily basis to contain or impede its rise. "

After the Trade War, a Real War with China?

" Five hundred years ago, Hernán Cortés began the European annihilation of the Mayan, Aztec, and other indigenous civilizations in the Western Hemisphere.  Six months later, in August 1519, Magellan [Fernão de Magalhães] launched his circumnavigation of the globe.  For five centuries thereafter, a series of Western powers — Portugal, Spain, Holland, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and, finally, the United States — overturned preexisting regional orders as they imposed their own on the world.  That era has now come to an end."

 Remarks to the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs
by Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
St. Petersburg, Florida, 12 February 2019

A sketch of the series "From Modernity to After-Modernity” (1)

A few weeks ago my friend Titus Hora (Facebook, Pinterest), and I, entered a conversation relating to art which is also the core subject of this blog. I wrote a sketch of a summary about my series of posts titled “From Modernity to After-Modernity” that I wanted to share with him and I post it here for the readers of this blog who might be interested.

After formatting the series I got some 1500 book pages that I’ll further edit and gradually publish within the coming months or years. This text is the first of two posts that sketch a summary, in 10 pages, of that series (1 page summary for every 150 pages in book format).

E-book

An e-book of all posts in the series “A growing disconnect between China and the West”.

After editing the posts the e-book totals 150 pages.

Click on its cover page hereunder for download.