I’ve been in an exploratory phase making poetic versions of my Rice artwork. My latest piece is 485 Minutes, is a collection of minimalist poems. More conceptual art piece than poetry collection, it is an experimental rice-reflective meditation on time.

It is heavily abstract. Geared toward readers who love the avant-garde & enjoy a good wander in the psyhadelic or mysterious. I’ve informally suggested pairing it with a 60bpm metronome on loop, for anyone chasing the fuller experience.

Going in, I knew it meant letting go of creative constraints. What came out in the end, I’m extremely proud of though. It’s definitely a unique style presentation.

The poems drift along through scenes at cafés, sidewalks, rice fields, storefronts, strangers, coffee cups and distant cities. Nothing explains itself quite concretely though. The spaces left open are deliberate like the white space in my visual pieces & allow interpreation without corrupting the intentional portions. Ultimately best viewed the way one would look at a strange object in a gallery. Sitting with it afterward for a bit to reach the understanding. By the end of the book, time transforms into a character.
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The collection as a whole points in many directions poem by poem, using different intellectual lights to shine on various facets of both the physical and philosophical considerations of time. Large areas of the subject are approached by associative means rather than direct statement. That did make certain parts of creating the work more challenging, but also more rewarding. 485 Minutes is a book that doesn't tell a tale about time in a literal sense so much as present it to you to view, one minute at a time, until you realize you are the one actually keeping that beat.

485 Minutes is available HERE

“The Idea" by Frans Masereel (Woodcut)

Classical art through time has focused on women as the purest embodiment of ideas and concepts rather than portray them as individuals. Women, regardless of medium, became a bridge between the physical plane and the realm of ideas, making abstract concepts visible. Art claimed "her" as its vision. The origins of this go back to the Greeks, where concepts such as Victory, Wisdom, Justice and Love were personified through female figures like Nike, Athena and Aphrodite. Artists kept this classical lens going, giving form to invisible ideals of Beauty, Truth, Liberty and Inspiration through the female body .

What's most striking is that the very absence of language around female individuality reveals a great beauty. The silence surrounding "her" in any portrayal transforms the woman from an individual figure into the embodiment of the allegory. Whatever she represents, beauty, war, spirituality, truth, or another ideal, the meaning becomes inseparable from the reason she exists. She's no longer just a figure within the image. She becomes the force that gives the image its form. No longer a mystery, but a source.

Two of my favorite works make this clear. The first is "The Idea" by Frans Masereel, a wordless story told in woodcut pictures. It tells the tale of an "Idea" born from a mind, seen through the lens of the idea as a naked woman who literally crawls out of the head of a man which is the mind of a thinker or creator itself. She moves through the world and meets fascination, desire, censorship, exploitation, violence, and eventually rebirth. The story holds a great many subjects to sit with, and it's mostly known for its focus on creativity and ideas, but the way it's told, using a woman as force and cyclical importance, all without a single word, means who she is ultimately is the "idea" itself. She holds thought, understanding, and inspiration.

Second is Paul Baudry's 'La Vérité' painting. It depicts a naked woman holding a mirror as she emerges from a well. The well is a symbol that goes back to the ancient Greek Democritus who wrote that "truth lies in a well." That well is a deep place where truth is stored like water for drinking. Truth is available from the well, but it never rests on the surface. It must be drawn from it. Her nudity signifies the absence of concealment, while the mirror she holds symbolizes revelation, reflection, and self-knowledge. But the woman is not looking at herself in the mirror. The mirror reflects in another direction, inviting us to ponder the surroundings in that physical way. The philosophical mirror comes through her eyes which are fixed on the viewer as a pondering mirror. Encouraging us to see ourselves through her in the piece via the pathway of the mind. Her mortal form functions as the Allegorical Site, the holder of the mirror, the place where truth emerges from concealment and comes solidly into view.

What we see in art depicted through a woman are truths and ideas made visible through idealized embodiment. The idealism acts as a spotlight of sorts. She is no longer a mystery but a source of meaning to her surroundings, but the mystery of her individuality can only be defined by the particular lady, herself. That gives the concept of woman a rarity which only makes her all the more beautiful, in both art and the world it reflects.

Though my blog post here concentrates on what's found in the subject of a woman through the use of her as an allegory, I'd highly suggest either the story or the painting for further pondering on other subjects and ideas the pieces discuss. That well is endless.

Original blog posted, HERE.

I've been building some mood board collections lately, and one of the images I placed in a recent set was so beautifully composed & evocative, that I just couldn't stop returning to it. A bit of browsing turned up countless homage style replicas of the same composition made by other photographers. That added to my curiosity about it and was enough to send me on a quest to find the origin of the initial image.

The photographer is a woman named Sheila Metzner. In the end, the image has a surprisingly accidental origin that fits its stunning appearance. The photograph was made for a Fendi fragrance campaign in the 1980s. There is something so poetic about it too. Even though it was created for an ad, it easily reads as a fine art piece on its own. The inspiration behind it was a well known myth. Ovid's Pygmalion, the story of a Cypriot sculptor who carved a likeness of his ideal woman, then fell in love with it & wished it alive. Aphrodite took pity on him and granted his wish, bringing the statue to life for him. Pygmalion discovered the transformation the moment he kissed it.
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Metzner received the concept for the campaign and was sent sketches of two full-length figures rendered as sculpture, drawing directly from the Pygmalion myth. Karl Lagerfeld sent his own mood boards, built around Mannerist painting, titled "The Passion of Rome” and the “Colors of Rome." The shoot was planned for the gardens of a museum in Rome. When Metzner and her crew arrived, the guard turned them away, insisting the garden counted as an "interior" space and that their permit only covered the parking area outside the gate. The team regrouped at the home of Alda Fendi to work out a new plan.

That change of plans is where the accident became destiny. In the entrance vestibule, on a table, sat an extraordinary ancient Roman marble bust. The model, Marie Sophie, walked up to it and gently kissed the figure on its cheek. Metzner captured the moment as it happened, then called hair, makeup, and wardrobe back in to formalize it. The result became "The Passion of Rome" for Fendi.

What moves me most isn't just the myth, or the image, but the way the photograph, like the statue in the story, seems to have found a greater purpose beyond what it was made for. This is something that happens often with art. The artist begins with an idea and chance supplies the thing that makes the idea something extraordinary. Metzner didn't stage the kiss, she simply acted as a medium for the muses, helping set the stage for it to appear.

The image, like Pygmalion's sculpture, has lived two lives. It began as a commercial fashion advertisement. Over time it became recognized as an important part of Metzner's artistic body of work, now exhibited, collected, and discussed as fine art photography, often with no mention of its commercial origins at all.

Its simple construction and its honeyed, Fresson tone give it a dreamlike resonance that matches its meaning and reveals something true about what beauty does for us in art. The same thing Aphrodite did for Pygmalion. It gives life to the art for us to love.

Blog originally posted, HERE.

...a collective of soulful breezes through the delicate lens of artist, .

Collecting is such a meaningful way to create a stirring universe. Being an artist, I am exposed to so many magical pieces and creations. My heart collects them all for eternity the moment I witness them. But of those, I must choose which few I can hold or own physically. That choice is a heavily curated, conscious process.
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Collections are often understood through the surface lens of monetary value or simple sentimentality, but they run so much deeper than that. Once a grouping exists, it is priceless and meaningful. Whether it is a set of objects or a shelf of books, it becomes an installation in and of itself. It transforms into a cosmic lens, one where everything within it, including the viewer, becomes art.

When we experience a collection, what we think and feel from it should do exactly that. Transform us, move us, elevate us, while at the same time keeping us intimately connected to the items and concepts the collection holds, along with the creators behind them. When we collect, we build quiet & incredibly personal displays. A series of windows that reflect our own souls back to us.

Seeing a collection come together is a mystical experience. These are profound journeys. They tell stories, move spirits, and remind us that everything which exists is not only a miracle but a portion of shared miracles. We don't always know where a piece has come from altogether, or where it is going ultimately, but we always know where it is, right now. That "right now" is a breath of life, an immortal one that only art can bring into the mortal world. Where a single piece is a breeze, the collection is the wind. Seeing the collection as a "wind made of many breezes" sits us in various spaces at once, something usually not permitted on the earthly plane, and somehow we find this ability, and from it, our spirits are revealed as limitless.

Blog originally posted, HERE.

A visual piece requires deconstruction, to various degrees, before it can be truly seen or understood. Color, composition, and form are the components presented. Meaning is assembled afterward, in that space between analysis and awareness in the viewer. My writing pieces, a style that I call "Ricewater," remove that step. Through word, it becomes an even more intimate window of contemplation or messaging.

In this practice, the words function as the reflection in the water droplet. Meaning is not built from the droplet's relation to other elements in a scene though. It is built immediately from the relation to the viewer. The reader is the point of contact itself, from the moment the droplet meets the surface it was made to speak to and from there, when a reader locates the specific meaning, they reflect it from within.

This is why the writing stays minimal. Restraint is not an aesthetic preference with space, in the way it is in a visual art piece. Here, it is structural, to remove the space. Each word, and the ultimate piece, carries the full weight of a direction, the way a single droplet carries the full weight of a scene. Complete and self-contained, requiring nothing but a reflected self-evidence beside it to be understood. To add more, the surface would feel overwhelmed or foreign and the precise meaning would be lost or untrue.
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The intimacy of this form comes from what it skips as opposed to what it offers outright. A viewer meets a painting and must first take it apart. A reader meets a Ricewater piece, a line for instance, and the meaning simply arrives, already personal and intimate. There is no analytical distance. The word does not represent, rather it behaves. The viewer's position then, is to let go in a meditative way and connect to the piece, allowing the quiet minimalism to be a light that reveals the meaning that is unique to their personal soul/lens.

Original blog post: HERE.

Andy Warhol, (self-portrait) 1958

To look at something and to take time with it are not the same act. We can study meaning and depth through classifications of our perception, but the deeper genres help us find the beauty and wisdom that what we analyze contains.

An example is the gaze. It is not a passive aspect of our perception. It is an active genre of its own, distinct from the glimpse, though ordinary language would flatten both into the single action of sight. A glimpse takes what it needs and moves along quickly and efficiently. The gaze deepens the existing perception and transforms it. It asks for time and for focused attention to translate its messages.

This distinction matters more than it first appears to. If the gaze were only a longer glimpse, the difference would be trivial. The shape would be more looking or less looking via the same act, but the gaze is not more of the same thing. It is a different kind of encounter, one that does not stop at the analytical mind cataloging shape and color. It reaches further, into the parts of us that recognize beauty, that feel empathy, that know and meet love.

The eyes are called windows to the soul and a window is not a one-way viewfinder. Light passes in both directions. To gaze at something is not only to take it in, it is to be met in return. What we gaze at reflects something back, and in that reflection we find not just the object, but additional aspects of ourselves.

The deeper genres replace the superficiality of mere description or recognition with the breadth of being. This is why art rewards the gaze and resists the glimpse. A painting glimpsed at is only information in the form of a subject, a palette, or a fact. Art gazed at asks something of the one who looks upon it to connect further. It holds still long enough that we have no choice but to bring ourselves to it. And in bringing ourselves, we discover what art has always offered, that it is not just a thing to be seen, but perceived profoundly and absorbed. The deepest eyes are the ones that see from the inside.

Blog origianlly posted HERE.

This piece began with a question rather than an image. What is texture, actually, when stripped of a specific subject or exact context?

Rather than relying on visual design alone, I made texture the central focus of the work. Instead of asking rice paper to reflect an external scene, I asked it to reflect portions of itself. Folded, layered, torn and reoriented, the material becomes both subject and language. Texture functions here as a suggestion, inviting the viewer to connect to physical experience rather than simply visual recognition. What those suggestions evoke beyond that will be unique to each person, but that nudge is precisely the point.

In making this work, I began to feel that texture reveals something deeper about perception itself. Whether encountered through sight or touch, texture is never entirely self contained. It always seems to point beyond itself, calling to mind another sensation, another memory, another thing. Without that gesture beyond itself, texture is little more than an inert surface. It is through association that it becomes meaningful. Texture becomes real to us the moment it ceases to be only itself and begins extending toward something else.

This is where traditional Japanese sensibility quietly runs beneath the surface of the work. Texture becomes a conduit for 'yūgen', that profound, mysterious depth which is sensed rather than seen. Nothing here is stated outright. Everything is implied. Meaning is not presented, it can only be discovered.

Here the ancient distinction between the form and the unstable matter upon which form is impressed comes into focus. Rice paper embodies that instability. It tears unevenly. It absorbs glue unevenly. Yet, it refuses to behave as a neutral. Every crease, line, and fiber is a tilted record of sorts. The material resists certainty, asking us to participate in completing what it begins. In that sense, every texture in this piece is doing the philosophical work. It indicates matter continually straining toward its end.

So when I say this piece is rice reflecting rice, I don't mean that it's simply self referential, a closed set of material describing only itself. Here, where the mirror and the mirrored are made of the same substance, every fold, every angle, every interruption still points beyond itself. Nothing here declares a specific meaning outright. Everything gestures toward one.

If a texture reminds you of something, if it stirs a memory, sensation, or feeling that cannot be entirely named, then it has fulfilled its purpose. Everything you see here was made to suggest rather than define. What those suggestions ultimately become, though, uniquely belongs to you. And like rice reflecting itself, one may look at this work, as with any work that suggests and discover portions of themselves within it. In that act of recognition, they become both witness and participant.

Originally posted on my website HERE.

It's always a good time for a trip through a flower field. In the book 'Flowers', artist Lucas Samaras doesn't disappoint. This wonderful collection of images is a journey through perception, and a very interesting one.

Samaras presents photographs of flowers that have been altered. Distorted, intensified in color and shape, fragmented, and ultimately reinvented through digital process into something hallucinatory. It's a technique he came to in his career already defined by self-representation and the transformation of ordinary objects into something stranger. Here in this book, the flower becomes the muse of his lens. The process itself acts as a metaphor for perception.

Normally these kinds of creative journeys make very clear statements or address direct subject matter through an interpretation. This one asks you to use direct subjects as the avenue to find yourself in the interpretive state... to see yourself as the statement instead, and the result becomes entirely interpretive. The symbolic use of flowers as the vehicle is what makes it so beautiful. You, the viewer, get to witness yourself bloom. Much like an actual psychedelic experience, where reality is experiencing itself.

The book is careful to separate the image from anything it might be compared to. The photographs only appear on the right side when you open it. The left side of every spread is left blank. I'm fond of this kind of intentional white space as an abstract artist myself. It functions as its own language, and it gives you complete liberty within it.

I struggle to say too much about this book, because as an art piece it is so highly personal in its interpretation. What I can say is that the design and the choices throughout are luminous, haunting, enchanting, and ultimately transporting. You find something new and intriguing every time you wander through it.
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Well worth the trip.

Originally posted HERE.

'The Kiss' sculpture by Romanian Modernist sculptor Constantin Brâncuși.

There are endless art pieces whose subject is a kiss. Rodin, Magritte, Klimt, Brâncuși, Chagall. Across centuries and entirely different visual languages, all of them returning to the same gesture, as though something about it can never be fully said and so it must keep being attempted.

There's a subdued, ancient idea I keep returning to when viewing these. In a variety of cultures, breath and soul were the same thing. Long before the Greeks split philosophy from poetry in order to analyze it, they believed 'pneuma', the breath moving in and out of the body, was inseparable from psyche, the soul itself. The word pneuma meant both breath and spirit at once, the invisible wind that animates the physical body and makes it more than matter. Aristotle's treatise 'On the Soul' used this concept to explain the functions of living things, proposing three tiers of soul: vegetable, animal, and rational, a framework that would go on to dominate psychology all the way into the 19th century. The Stoics took it even further, treating pneuma as a fiery, breath-like substance that was not only the foundation of the individual human soul but the active, organizing principle of the entire cosmos.

Because that 'soul substance' was thought to be material and fluid rather than abstract, it was believed to migrate toward wherever a person's desire or attention was focused. So to breathe was not separate from being. It was the very mechanism of being. Inhale, and a little more life enters you. Exhale, and a little of that same life leaves to go wherever breath, and desire, goes.

A kiss, seen through that particular lens, becomes something far stranger and more beautiful than affection alone. It is two private atmospheres meeting at a single threshold, the mouth, and refusing, for one suspended moment, to stay separate. Some ancient epigrams describe this almost literally as a transfer of the divine spark itself, a kiss bestowing something like spirit and truth between two people, not as metaphor but as material fact.

Plato wrote of feeling his own soul rise to his lips while kissing someone, as though it might cross over entirely into someone else, the boundary between two selves grown thin enough to slip through. Not that a kiss symbolizes closeness, but that the ancients believed it physically enacted it. Breath given as a gift and breath received as one, exchanged in the single gesture, so that for an instant neither person can say with certainty whose life is whose, but that it as one is the embodiment of the sublime.

I think this is why a kiss has never felt insignificant to us, even now, centuries after anyone believed breath was literally spirit. Some older knowledge survives in the body even after the language for it disappears. We still, instinctively, hold our breath before a kiss, as if some part of us still understands we are about to give something away.
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In viewing or experiencing a piece of art or writing, it can be an interesting, soulful challenge not just to generally relate to it or to understand what it evokes, but to find within the piece itself the precise portion or moment where those kissing souls meet and suddenly merge into one, and then to feel that merged version of that soul meeting your own.

Originally posted: HERE.

Whenever I'm speaking with someone who isn't accustomed to connecting with abstract, minimalist, or symbolic art, I often point them toward William Blake's poem “Auguries of Innocence.” Blake uses simple, everyday imagery to express ideas that are vast, emotional, and metaphysical. His poem demonstrates how a small physical object or reference can open into a much larger meaning. This is precisely the kind of seeing that less literal art asks of us. It invites another mode of perception.

The idea of seeing heaven in a wildflower, for instance, offers a way of understanding different kinds of sight. For strict admirers of realism, the challenge is often learning to see beyond the literal image. It requires seeing from the inside, as it were. In this way, abstract or symbolic art becomes self-evident. Singular or reduced forms reveal that simplification is not the result of having less to say. Rather, it is an attempt to say more with less.

The goal is maximum impact through the smallest amount of physical information necessary to evoke an idea, feeling, or experience. It is a form of compression. A concentrate.

The art emerges when that compression becomes powerful, striking, beautiful, or deeply expressive. In that moment, process and emotion work together to reveal the heavenly space within the mortal one. We are moved inwardly by something that arrives through the vessel of physical form.

This idea lies at the heart of my paper boat series, in its emotional sense. The poem that inspired the work embodies this principle. The gentle glide and airy movement of a fragile paper boat becomes a symbol for the movement of the heart and soul. The boat itself is simple, but what it carries is immense.

Original blog posted in my website: HERE.

John Lennon is remembered for many things, but I am most drawn to what I think of as his 'psychedelic mirror'. A type of persepctive.

His use of psychedelics is well documented and is often attached to stories of everyday interest. Antics during a trip, for example or more gossip prone subjects, such as how his first wife, Cynthia, viewed his LSD use as a major factor in the breakdown of their marriage. However, from a creative and personal perspective, I find Lennon's psychedelic lens far more interesting. It reveals many of the things art itself seeks to achieve. New ways of seeing, new ways of saying things, and the discovery of meaning from unusual angles.

Through his music, writing, and artwork, Lennon often presents abstract, highly fragmented modes of perception. Experience breaks into analyzable shards, each piece detached from the whole yet bright with exaggerated clarity. The result can either shed new light on something familiar or create entirely new meaning. When done best, it does both at once.

One example of this can be found in his song Out of the Blue. The song itself is about Yoko Ono, but the color blue in the title appears to have a deeper origin. According to Lennon, part of the inspiration came from an LSD experience in which he stared at himself in a mirror and became fascinated by the presence of the color blue while looking at his own reflection.

That color became associated with a powerful force or energy when he saw his soul refelcted, something he later connected to the profound impact Yoko had on his life. Yet the title itself functions much like a mirror, revealing two truths at once. On one hand, Yoko entered his life unexpectedly. She appeared "out of the blue." On the other, her presence helped lift him from a place of deep uncertainty, bringing him out of the blue in the emotional sense.

Seeing a single thing from multiple perspectives is one of art's great powers. It allows both the creator and the viewer to move beyond the obvious and discover new layers of interest & meaning. In a way, it brings both out of the blue and into the blue. A supernatiral swim in the blue pool of transcendence.

This is what I love about Lennon. There is always something mystical or spiritual just beneath the surface. As a viewer, I often feel as though the mirror has become liquid and that, if we are adventurous enough, we can reach through it into another dimension of seeing and come out of our experience with it, transformed.

There are numerous photographs of Lennon exploring themes of reflection and mirrors, as well as the more well known sketch he made of himself with his own reflected image. Viewed together, they suggest that the mirror was more than a visual motif. It was a recurring study & symbol of self/exploration, perception, and transformation. Perhaps mirrors are not merely mirrors at all, they're actually blue doorways.

Blog originally posted HERE.

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”

— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

As far as things go, I’ve always loved a good vintage, and that includes poetry. There’s something deeply special about returning to older works and rediscovering their hidden treasures.

The Beat poets had rare and powerful gifts. Their use of language created little universes that conveyed vast emotional depths. They often took ordinary, everyday objects and scenes and transformed them into something far more meaningful. What begins as a simple description becomes a deeply lived experience. After reading their work, the world itself begins to look like poetry.

One of my favorite poems is Jack Kerouac’s “Hitchhiker.” Kerouac’s framing of the road as a symbol for life has long been a favorite of mine, and this poem elevates it even further. In a single roadside scene, he presents a hitchhiker standing in the rain, trying to catch a ride to sunny California, wearing an “awful raincoat” that makes him look like “a selfdefeated, self murdering imaginary gangster.” He imagines the drivers passing by projecting their worst fears onto him. On the surface, the tone is weary, paranoid and coldly observational. Yet the deeper magic of the poem reveals a hidden message. Through the rainy weather, it suggests that darkness is only the immediate reality, while hope lies in the sunshine of the destination. But it is more than this.

At its core, one man stands on the road simply hoping to connect with another willing to share their space to assist him. The driver, who may be lacking greater purpose, gains it by offering help to the hitchhiker. In this way, the hitchhiker and the driver become interconnected. They need each other to elevate. Not in spite of the odds, but because of them. Together then, they give the road itself its purpose. When viewed through this lens, everything becomes beautiful and necessary. Every journey, no matter how small, becomes meaningful through this experience. I feel that this same shared experience also occurs between a reader & a poem.

Blog originally posted on my website: HERE.

“KEROUAC ON THE BUS” published HERE.

Source: "Contact Warhol: Photography Without End"

Contact and call sheets are such great artistic adventure scapes. In a single frame you can experience a kind of suspended universe, the photographer or filmmaker’s entire process captured and held in one place. This morning I was reading some opinions on beauty in art, and it drove me to revisit Andy Warhol’s contact sheets.

I think Andy was so ahead of his time, much of which we likely won’t understand until even later. I don’t say this in a superficial way. Andy had a wildly cool artistic lens for seeing things and presenting them in ways we can only achieve now with technology and understand only by looking much further inward. That fact struck me all over again while looking at these sheets today.

In a 1985 interview he spoke about his photographs being more of a diary to him. Essentially linking the art he produced directly to the lived experience that created it. That alignment of forces and places fits the definitive meaning of art and aesthetics. The root of “art” is the -ar, meaning “to join,” and “aesthetics” which comes from Greek conceptual thought which refers not just to visual or physical sensation but to something interchangeable and often interdependent between the physical world and the realms of consciousness/perception.

I feel like Andy had a deep sense of that greater alignment in both how he produced his work and how he existed in the world. It’s a stance that is very forward. Art by classical view, is judged by skill against a set of rules or precise physical criteria in the form of physical realism. For example, drawing a dog where the more realistic it is, the “better” it is. Or, less directly, like Rothko’s color fields, where he used physical scale to create a goal: how the viewer would experience intimacy simply by standing in front of the piece and comparing scale between the two.

​Painters like Pollock began to flip that script, using physical means to reach an internal goal making perception itself the entire point, rather than the physical object. With Andy’s images, he took all of this even a step further. His view of the photographs as a diary to share with an onlooker didn’t just encapsulate all those earlier concepts at once it moved forward with them them. It allowed the viewer to meet the artist in an intimate connection, sharing a wide scope of life in a single still image. The viewer and the artist could sit down together over that image and see one another's experience.

It leads me, as an artist, to wonder if there is a kind of scale or balance between physical and intellectual/emotional perceptions, set against our shared physicality in any current state. In Andy’s lens it seems, the invention of the camera instantly made even something as simple as “drawing a dog” far more meaningful in terms of the artist’s skill and/or message rather than the product itself. After all, if pure hyper-realism is what you wanted alone, a camera or film would always be more precise. But the fact that the camera exists almost makes the drawn version seem even more interesting and beautiful.

Abstract and contemporary art in non classical senses that lean into meaning and points of view rather than structural realism could very well indeed be more organic than we realize., I find it especially profound that Andy could see a still, unmoving image as something capable of both capturing & sharing a lived experience as opposed to the image acting as a descriptive aid. I don't think that became relatable in a mainstream sense til much later.

Maciunas, Fluxus Manifesto. 1963 (MoMA)

Fluxus was never a style. It was, and remains a method of rupture against whatever form the bourgeois separation of Art from life has taken.. A rupture practice that is absolutely necessary in any era if we’re to authentically experience art. Particularly now while drowning in overly curated, mass marketed products that speak more to phantom, meta realm vanity than to meaningful artistic form.

Our tech age has birthed its own bourgeois sickness. One that goes beyond what the original Fluxus movement diagnosed. We stand in a mutation space parallel to the “Europanism” the manifesto critiques.

Original Fluxus rejected the European cult of elitism and flaunting pretense by stripping away the frivolous superiority that elevated art above actual life. But today’s version of the sickness is different. Status and worth are now granted through emptiness via nihilistic intensity,.. through metrics, spectacle & meaningless self quantification. Its defined by smoke and mirrors, artificial exclusivity, and number based fame. All those things have replaced traits of opulence, decadence, and the worship of grandeur as the new measures of worth. Instead of a disconnect hiding behind excess, we now face a disconnect that masquerades as importance.

In this way, the original Fluxus idea foreshadowed the new disease. What began as a flowing "be here now" method to counter a flowless state, has become the very strain of the virus we now face, leaving meaning and nuance lost at sea. The manifesto becomes an organic moment in time, readable with clarity when coupled with present wisdom. To go beyond the negative effect, one must take the already blurred line between art and non‑art and eliminate it entirely in favor of art,
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To be truly Fluxus now, you would have to recognize the act of total refusal of objects like authority and institutions require a structure force that renders the Fluxus itself an object. That fact swings the pendulum back where it came from as opposed to moving forward. If everything isn't art, then nothing is.

Blog originally posted HERE

Images: Book-Digital Nudes, DAVID LYNCH & David Lynch in the late 1960s, when he was an art student living in Philadelphia. C.K. WILLIAMS

The reflective and comparison natures fascinate me. So much so that I’ve made that sort of thing a signature for over a decade in my own work with my “Rice” pieces. Any creations that explore deep subject matter analysis instantly draw me in. One of my favorite artists in this vein is David Lynch. I could easily (as many do and have, and better than I can, certainly) write an entire library on what I love about David and his creations. He was a true visionary and a genius communicator.


Since this is in fact a blog and not a thesis, I’ll simply offer some personal notes here to entertain on how his views about beauty manifested through his work and gave glimpses into himself in particular ways. All of which, amongst others garnered from his work, have deeply moved me.


David's vocal tone was very neighborly and kind-seeming, so I've always loved listening to his interviews. A particular favorite was one from the 2016 documentary “David Lynch: The Art Life.” He recounted the first time seeing a naked woman as a young man, and the story itself really helped me see and understand his work to a far greater degree. He explained being outdoors with his brother and then seeing a naked woman emerge from the dark, seemingly mid-crime of some sort where she had been victimized. Her being completely nude, mouth bloodied, and hysterically crying affected him with a sort of psychological fracture in that moment. He felt traumatized by her condition yet also seeing the beauty of her nude form as beautiful. He closed by saying he wanted to do something to assist but was too little. It was at that moment having his psychology in two places at once like that, it seems he developed a participating mode with existence in his consciousness that forever manifested as dances with shadows and light.


There have been countless things written over the years about his portrayal of his leading lady characters debating whether he was misogynistic, and I don’t think he was. I feel the opposite, actually. He always gives his ladies such deep and complicated stories for a viewer to have to look at her and see her as multilayered with no escape from it. My opinion is that he had a very complex and pure view of women that is so much so, it’s difficult for me to explain. And I do think his whole life long he was aware of being connected to that with intent as a result of that incident.


You can see it manifest in aesthetics with the signature red lip on many of the leading ladies. But the characteristics of people within the stories interacting with women reveal very interesting things too. I feel him often giving his ladies either relief or hope of overcoming challenges shows his empathy, and even in times where the women cannot escape, he presents it to an audience from a perspective that they should be tapping into empathy for he women even when the story doesn't.


A few of my favorite views come from Twin Peaks. I feel like he experienced his own self in ways in this regard as a fractured self... putting himself into characters directly as abstract fragments of a whole. His Agent Cooper/Bob persona (mortal physical self with both darkness and light aspects) watched over by his “boss” persona (analytical and conscious self) Gordon Cole . Both men ultimately being subject to the Organization of the 'Federal Bureau of Investigations,' which possibly symbolizes the entirety of existence of all aspects unified, where Cole was the conscious aspect and Cooper the general man. That dynamic where Cooper and Cole would periodically meet and communicate in different ways was simply exquisite from that lens. A scene that really reveals how this ties into him noticing beauty and how it gives him so much more as a person is a scene where Cole, who is hard of hearing, notices Shelly’s beauty while at the diner. When he goes to the counter to order, he can suddenly hear clearly, but only when Shelly speaks. This giving clarity to what would otherwise be muffled or misunderstood noise.


Another character in the series who offers insight to this is Audrey Horne. Again with the signature pin-up red lip, who often flirts with Agent Cooper, symbolizing how her beauty doubles as something to get his attention and connect to. And if one does pay attention to her, she spends much of the series investigating like he does, offering both a kindred set of attributes and showcasing the strength and abilities in a woman should be noticed. His photography of women in his nude imagery collections is much the same thing. They are presented in ways that play with shadows and light and challenge the viewer to see something about them through and about the woman and the beauty she herself leaves in the images as opposed to creating a scenario she would be second to.


The end scene in Twin Peaks: The Return really wraps up his view on it neatly, where all the dances of shadow and light ultimately lead back to the dances being fractured. Agent Cooper, instead of seeking clues as to what is outside reality, is suddenly left asking what reality was. When Agent Cooper verbalized that, it triggers the Palmer character back into an aware distress state herself. Given all the horrors and strangeness surrounding the view, one thing is clear: David himself loved complex, mysterious beauty in women. It wasn’t performative. So much so that he literally, in how it’s presented in his art anyway, saw this beauty as something so intense and wide in scope that his manhood and life meaning was directly affected, altering purpose and destiny to where to know it he had to turn it into art. It’s all so moving and so much of what he offered stays with me. He was a beautiful person. And that kind of beauty always saves the girl.

Original blog post on my website HERE.

(Article source: May 1990, The Rocket)

Our every moment is a mystical metaphor.

Full Blog: HERE.

“Innocent droplets of rain
Make almost all events
Quite natural.”
― Visar Zhiti

✨Poem “Water Falls” by Jim Jarmusch.

✨Image and sound are echoes bestowed by the muses of the Hawaiian Mountains 8/28/2025.

✨Quote from ”A Rainy Day” by Visar Zhiti

Chu Shu-Chen, “Morning.” A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, edited by Czesław Miłosz, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1996.

Chu Shu-chen lived around the year 1200, though no one knows for sure. Speculation about her life varies widely. Some say she endured a hopeless marriage, others that she was a scholarly daughter chafing against society’s confines. A few even suggest her poems may have been written by men adopting a woman’s voice. We will never know the truth. What we do have are over a hundred poems credited to her, works steeped in emotional and intellectual loneliness, the pain of confinement, the fraudulence of superficiality, and a deep ache for beauty, truth, and authentic connection.

The poem presented here is especially powerful. It does more than express her point of view. It dismantles the facade of what ails her and transforms the beautiful, deep soul trapped in that reality into something immortal. The poem offers a short but potent narrative of a woman at her dressing table, performing beauty rituals she has grown to despise. These rituals, rouging her cheeks, painting her eyebrows, steaming her heavy braids, leave her hollow and longing.

Written in a dual way, intensely personal yet stripped of specific autobiographical details, it becomes far more than one woman’s lament. Because it speaks to experiences nearly every woman can recognize, it rises into an anthem. The simple title “Morning” is perfect in this regard. It does not merely describe her morning. It symbolically captures every day.

Through this poem, Chu Shu-chen frees herself from the very rituals and superficial things that confined her. What she once felt alone with in silence now becomes her strength. Her profound need to be truly seen, heard, and connected with in an authentic way is finally fulfilled through her art. Centuries later, the physical details of her life, her cheeks, her heavy braids, her maid, even the exact circumstances of her loneliness, have all faded into speculation. What remains vivid and intact is the message born from her Art Mind: the very part of her that felt most overlooked. The part that had no one to connect with is now seen and honored with every reading. And with each new reading, the sun rises again as it's own dawn. This time carrying her wisdom and the quiet power of her confrontation with truth. That quiet power was her real beauty that existed all along.

🌺✨“Poetic lyrics were important, but it felt like women sometimes hid behind poetry as a way to say something without actually saying it. I was on a mission to just fucking say it.”

-Kathleen Hanna

Content Warning: French poetry featured in this post contains symbolic depictions of violence, intended to evoke specifics in emotional and psychological themes. Those sensitive to intense imagery or subject matter are encouraged to proceed with discretion.

There’s nothing better than a good poem. A truly exceptional one can even feel like a magical experience in its complexity. One of the most powerful ways to reach that level is through symbolism. Symbols not only tell stories outright, they also serve as creative shorthand for deeply complicated meanings & layered narratives.

Useful, yes... but symbols also carry an element of mystery. Sometimes a single symbol seems to take on a life and persona of its own. One that doesn’t change, no matter who is using it or how it’s being applied. It acts like a living being, leaping between creations &remaining intact. It creates a kind of mystical rarity, where familiarity follows wherever it appears, adding depth to the various points where one stumbles upon its presence. As if it were a true, living character in the creative world. One such symbol is that of the Genie.

Here, I invite you as a reader on a journey of comparison. Two poems, from two different cultures and time periods, sharing the symbolic use of the Genie in their storytelling. The poems themselves offer distinctly different stories and meanings, yet the Genie within them exhibits the same persona: an embodiment of mystery, a character of the unexplainable otherworld that when touching our world brings magic.

“CONTE” (Tale) by Arthur Rimbaud

In “Conte”, poet Arthur Rimbaud crafts a surreal allegory of a prince who, disillusioned by the hollow ideals and outcomes of love and perfection found in the physical world, turns to symbolic passionate violence in search of deeper truths. Truths that might satisfy the expectations and desires of his internal world. His journey leads to a mystical encounter with a Genie, who embodies transcendent mystery, desire and spiritual depth. When experienced, this union briefly fulfills the prince’s longing in a physical sense but the effect is neither lasting nor complete.

Even this ecstatic moment dissolves, leaving only the aching awareness that refined beauty and art, symbols of physicality throughout the piece, fall short of satisfying the soul’s deepest longing. Conte is not a tale of resolution, it's one of existential awakening.

What makes this particular poem so outstanding is the manner in which it’s presented. In its latter section, Rimbaud explains through comparison and dualistic philosophy that the Genie and the Prince are indistinguishable. Reality and fantasy blur. Time and age dissolve. Ultimately, even the reader and the poem become indistinguishable as the reader relates. This leads to the final line:

“La musique savante manque à notre désir.” (Great music falls short of our desire.)

This statement ties the meaning of the poem together in the most incredible way. It compares music, art in a refined physical form, to an ideal. Then reveals that human longing is even greater. Desire becomes the true ideal.

What ultimately makes this truly exquisite is its use of vagueness. The term desire is never defined. It becomes a yearning for anything that might fill an absence or void, including knowledge not yet possessed. Vagueness itself becomes part of that desire. Suddenly, the line about the Genie being the Prince and the Prince the Genie makes sense: fulfillment and desire are inseparable. Great music is nothing without the desire that seeks it, and desire is nothing without the music it longs for.

The poet becomes the Genie and the Prince. The lack of physical union between them as entities makes everything simultaneously divided and yearning. And then, all at once, everything becomes a representation of the highest beauty found in longing itself as they all embody it through individual existence and the awareness of it.

This is exquisite. A nearly perfect poem. Its style, characters, arrangement, meaning and word choices- all are masterful. And the use of the Genie as the ingredient of the mysterious—that gives us its magic.

“STONE FRUIT SKY” by A.F. King

This poem paints a transformation through the trance-like journey of dreams beginning at sunset. Its symbolism lies in the sky, using imagery of stone fruits, apricots, plums, peaches, and clementines. The fruit becomes a symbol of the sky as a backdrop to a sincere kind of mysterious magic, the kind that begins precisely when the sky changes color. That change being heavily symbolic as moving from a muted to an alive beautiful experience.

The sky is described as if evoked by a released genie, summoned not by intention, but by a child who accidentally brushes against a lamp at a yard sale. Perhaps a fated moment or by chance. Not to summon wishes, but to stir dreams through a random act.

It ends with the sky imagined as a steaming wok, blending colors like fruit into a spread of jam. This symbolism is so pleasing and lovely because it evokes the imagery of ingesting the sweetness that hits you long before you experience it physically joining anticipation to the sweetness.

In this poem, the genie’s mystery is both a cause and an effect. The lines describing the genie being evoked innocently by a child speak to a youthful and uncorrupted energy. One that brings about the genie’s magic and mystery, spreading across the sky.

Here, the genie symbolizes internal awakening and transformation, in the form of enchantment and the beauty of pleasant sensory effects. The words are carefully placed within their surrounding story. What makes this genie remarkable is that it does not speak of desire, but of dream-states, something that happens to you, rather than from you, like desires.

The deepest beauty of this poem, in my opinion, is the use of stone fruits as color indicators. Though the staging of the poem and the use of the Ifrit as a genie element suggest an evening scene, the symbolism of the fruits and the child, who could represent early time frames, makes the poem feel equally like a sunrise piece. In that reading, the dreams become daydreams.

This interchangeability makes the reader feel as though we cannot tell the difference between day or evening, between daydreams or night dreams, or youth and old age and neither would matter. Because the journey is colorful and sweet. Including the unknown and anticipation.

Either poem is a perfect read to fill ones spirit with the truth that magic brought about by mysterious Genies is everywhere. Not just outside, but also within.

POEMS:

Rimbaud, Arthur. The Illuminations. Translated by Keith Miller, Quinx Books.

King, A.F. Clock Counting. Cover illustration by Arumisarri.