ACCI Gallery has a call for art for their upcoming The Gray Area exhibition. Basically neutral tone images. I have a few images that I have felt were interesting compositions which were lacking in strong color attributes or values. So, I am thinking this might be an opportunity to finalize them in gray tones.
There are images from my mandala work and others from my “paradox” or mirror work.
Created from a photo of a public sculpture at the Bay St. mall in Emeryville.
Created from a waterfall in New Jersey
The pair of docks that inspired my paradox series
Familiar local landscape
I love the grain and the message… and this is kind of the beginning of a new focus on graffiti and public art
the rain falls on a broad hillside of imagination. it gathers, at first in trickles and then, in rivulets finally, it babbles into a brook… closing off other possibilities it tumbles into the channel of other rain that fell long ago in another… life, a canyon carved deep by thoughtful repetition… I think, this is how it has always been how it must be
Yes, and… then the knowing comes: I can open
the rain may fall on something deep and wide, a lake of imagination. in knowing, not thinking… I can open to loving the rain, holding compassion for the fall, in joyous empathy, leaving me unperturbed. calm and at peace with my treasured qualities of being I can open: and the knowing comes
Seed line for this poem is from “I love the dark hours,”A Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
Seed line used for writing session: “The center of everything. Leave nothing in your wake.” from the poem Regret Nothing by January Gill O’neill
The Center of Everything by Alan Zucker
As the river rushes around me I hear the voice from the bank.
This moment. This place and time. This is the center of everything. What happens next is your choice. Will you choose based on fear?
Will you allow the love to flow and carry you to a place where you let go of aversion and desire, so that you can see precisely what is required?
Then and there, you will regret nothing. Then and there, you will leave nothing in your wake. Then and there, your actions will be aligned in accord with what is. Walking with your whole heart intact.
Sometimes I feel a special kind of alone that is mournfully reminiscent of a cold and windy day in December, on the beach in Atlantic City.
It arises, oddly enough, from disappointment in the behavior of those whom I love, who tread a path of self destruction.
I walk with them by their side in support of their freedom to choose, their liberty to learn through their dreadful decisions.
I am with them buttoned and bundled against frigid and sharp bluster of sand-swept wind, trying to make sense of the incongruous beauty.
Yet I am alone, to parry the creations that are born of their free will, unsheltered from the storm of consequences
So, I scream in primal release out toward the ocean, or into my white knuckled hands, to release the sadness and tight-tension reactivity pelting me from within
And, I come back to a neutral center, and forgive them for not being who I expected them to be.
It sounds weird to say that I am grateful for the pain.
To be clear, I don’t enjoy it. I am not masochistic.
This is one of those make lemonade situations.
The pain, you see, attracts the mind’s attention. The sharper the pain, the more total the attention. Through this hyper-focus generously pour intention for liberation and peace, with dollops of loving kindness, for the benefit of all.
Of course, we would much rather work with the breath. Let the mind find focus in the rhythmic flow of the quiet moments. Way more comfortable.
