This is painting at its best.  Pure expression.  Genius composition.  Genius color harmony.  Totally spontaneous.  Perfect performance.  Perfect balance between motif, color harmony, brushwork, artist's personality.   What's wrong with it?  It is a clear mirror in which to see your preconcieved notions.  All the stuff that doesn't register the work as genius.  When a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees are the pockets.  Raja Yoga.  Perfect 10.
 

        

        

‘Post-industrial capitalism’ is an unconscious euphemism for ‘bankrupt’. The collusion of economists and financiers in the active program of theft, which is now the largest American corporations, is only the most prominent signal. To speak the usual truism, it is ‘the system’ itself which is bankrupt. But what is not usual is the solution. << MORE >>

        

One of the peculiarities of the Gospel of Thomas – and therefore presumably of the Thomas tradition – are the Sayings which suggest not only that ‘the name’ of Jesus is not a necessary adjunct for the transmission, but also that the Presence which Jesus has manifested is now indigenous – teleologically, I suppose – in all serious religious endeavor. << MORE >>

        

        

When I was fifteen, Alan Watts and Jean-Paul Sartre were two demigods of the underground, both of whom I found essentially unreadable at the time. Nor have they become particularly more readable since. Like Freud, in our present quickfood culture, not being here now, they instantly fade into oblivion, although Watt’s books are still on the bookstore shelves.<< MORE >>

 

             At certain points in the not too distant past, it has been appropriate, in American Zen, to speak of the ‘two Suzukis’. In apposition to the intellectual / anti-intellectual presentation of Suzuki Daisetz, we have the pragmatic, but also essentially verbal teachings of Suzuki Roshi, Shunryu Suzuki. While undoubtedly Roshi’s American students will disagree with me about the ‘essentially’ verbal nature of his teachings, I am not altogether impressed with what I have seen of the first and second generation of disciples. He brought a peculiar light, but his light was grounded in an extraordinary document, the Shobogenzo of Dogen Zenji.

            At this point, the Shobogenzo, the ‘Treasury of the True Dharma Eye’, is the only piece of Japanese Zen that interests me.

 
 

            What the Shobogenzo showed me, finally, is that Zen is Chinese and not Japanese. If Dr. D. T. Suzuki is the scholarly epitome of modern Japanese Zen – and presumably he is – then even the transmission is suspect in my eyes. Like the late Korean students of Zen, Dogen captured the final reflective flowering of the Zen tradition in China, the historical summation of the classical period in Chan or Zen in which a renascent tradition produces exponents who summarize the voluminous records of the classical teachings and classical teachers – a paper compendium, which is simultaneously comprehensive and fragmentary. Comprehensive because an incredible range of the lineages is represented. Fragmentary because of the empirical and pragmatic nature of the teachings, almost entirely composed of immediate interactions between teachers and students, teachers and teachers, and students and students.

 

 

            The period of classical Chan or Zen only lasted for two or three centuries in China. It coincided with one of the highest periods of classical Chinese culture, and helped feed back into a resuscitation of Daoism and Confucianism as well as a synthetic or syncretistic movement. But it endured a fairly extended period of decadence before the great koan collections were produced. And these collections themselves reflect a self-consciousness about the decadence as well as a new flowering of the tradition. But, of course, such a ‘flowering’, being reflective or retrospective, involves a subtly differing intent from the original impulses. Nevertheless, since we are outside both ‘classical’ periods, this is our necessary window. We need to find the borders in order to find the center.

 

 

            Thus far, it would seem that only one of these documents takes full account of this situation, and finally includes the context in the text. This, of course, is The Book of Serenity. Perhaps the glib eye can skate over a passage or two. But the text defies a linear reading. But the issue of importance here is the fact that the book consists in perspectives of awakening. Awakening itself involves a hierarchy, since light and darkness are each potential windows. But, since awakening is also whole and part, every individual is distinct, even in awakening. Awakening is not different from the individual nature, as much as a given perspective might be characterized by a generalization as well, since awakening, by definition, is also a ‘universal’.

 

 

– Jeremy

 

        

Always loved this but now I understand it at a much deeper level.  So rich...

        

 

 

the aesthetic witnessing of the kingdom   the real basis of the modern         –  from ‘Grail King (King of Cups)’, tarot poem

the Artist awakens the Sage   prophetic light, prophetic voice – nevertheless the first desire is aesthetic       –  from ‘Grail Knight’ tarot poem

 

 

 

–  [ Professor M. (Editor) ]

 

 

        

        

 

                                                        Perceval

 

 

 

                                            whether I have

                                            lost my memory

                                            or been transported

                                            by the hermit’s

                                            magic, I do not

                                            know, but it would

                                            seem that I have

                                            fallen in the East,

                                            far from the mist

                                            green meadows

                                            of my native

                                            rivers

 

        

 

out of the boundary stones – the voices of God   beyond the heaven worlds of the western darkness, the outside place

that bright breathing steel- born dream   bodies ascending between the two horns

perceval child of the Sword child of the steel no sword can defend thee against the day or the year

 

 

        

 

            There is an actual rhetoric to our present speech, something the ‘modernist’ artifice fails to notice.

 

            The rhetorical basis of the American language has shifted away radically from the British.

            It begins in plainstyle, the educated corollary for the frontier effect – the deconstruction to the basis of necessity. Being English middle class, it flattens the language, opening it up to the external. The final shift is African, Caribbean and other native influences introducing a force of rhythmic diversity beginning in raw syncopation.

            Hence the division between a rhythmically dead intellectual poetry and hip-hop.

            Hip-hop produces textures. Snoot ‘poetry’ clings to its denial of the Shakespearean iamb.

 

 

 

– the Critic

 

 

        

        

 

 

 Contrary to the beginner’s course, certain premises are reversed :

 

                        The motif in art is not one’s own.

 

                        We are born with an ear for the ‘higher conversation’ which is ‘art’.

 

 

 

            The motif in art is not one’s own :

 

 

            The motif in art is not the motive of the artist. The craftsman’s motif depends on audience. The artist’s motif is at least a personal god. The presence of this personal god defines the artist at the outset, defines the act of the artist in terms of impulse and intent.

            To speak of value is as crippling as the Buddha name in Zen.

 

 

 

            We are born with an ear for this ‘higher conversation’ :

 

 

            First mind is the mind of the artist in each of us. The distance between first mind and formal creativity is death & rebirth, the expulsion and return to Eden. The creative act dies into its own beauty. Connoisseurship requires the open mind that can die into the mind of the artist. Art teaches us the frame of the tradition. Reborn, the tradition becomes the living Eye.

 

 

 

– Jeremy

 

 

 

        

 

 

 

theology

 

 

 

cause established

through prophetic

power –

 

Calvin lives –

his gifted

rebus

slaying

‘sinners’, the

‘fallen’ –

the zen sword

of the west –

his fate &

free will

will always

be the

stumbling

stone

block of

the west

 

now as the

twisted Eye

of physical

light –

Einstein & Lorentz –

& the self-positing

self

of Fichte

 

 

 

– the priest

 

 

 

        

 

why I always chose the poetry –   only poetry retains the esoteric force of reality                     – Jeremy

perhaps –   today only poetry retains (etc.)

even science now finds its blind way in technocracy   shunning the moment of convincing otherness –   objectivity –   the mystical realities of Einsteinian paradox

[ poetry is my ishta deva

in the arts, synecdoche

for living traditions ]

 

 

 

        

        

Imaginary Portrait 22x30, oil on paper, 1980

www.antoniosalemme.org

        

 

 

            [I suppose you could

            call it ‘reading

            the book of serenity’]

 

 

 

            expressed

            recitation

            refines

            the crazed

            actors

 

            the

            knowledge

            seal of

            not

            knowing

 

            at

            defiance,

            shunted

            eyeballs

            scan the

            ancient

            ranges

 

 

 

 

                                                                    – Jeremy

 

 

        

 

Question : Why isn’t photography an art?

 

Answer : Because photography is view alone. Nature and camera determine the view finally, however subtle the selection. Sophistication of choice is not ‘creativity’ – the obverse whose reverse is epiphany or awakening.

 

Question : But isn’t all representational art ‘view’?

 

Answer : The two sides of your question require two answers. All art is representational as ‘view’, if ‘view’ is a window on the artist. Even craftwork, however banal, reflects its maker.

            But all that is legitimately art is motif. Motif separates art from craft. The motive of craft is not one’s own.

 

Question : But isn’t motif ‘view’?

 

Answer : This is the level of understanding we begin with in this culture.

            No. Motif is not ‘view’.

            Motif begins in a subjective moment of invitation initiated through the perceptual instance of some ‘external’ concatenation. As such, motif is as much a process as a formal presentation. And the inceptive presentation is perceptual – the spontaneous response of consciousness – not necessarily the external in view.

            Hence, motif develops as the artist proceeds.

            In the legitimate artist, the motif is the final value expression inherent in the work – being the spontaneous product of the ‘moment’ from invitation to finished object. What makes the vocational artist is the coherence of the value from inception to completed work – that all actions emerge from this ‘final’ value.

 

            This, of course, is a relatively cognitive definition of motif, and should not be taken as a comprehensive definition of art, in any sense. At the same time, it suggests the first qualitative shift in consciousness required on the path to connoisseurship – that we must begin to distinguish between ‘content’ and ‘motif’.

            Apart from William and Antonio, I have neither seen nor heard any contemporary art criticism that makes or is based in this distinction. Antonio initiated us into his understanding by saying, in front of his work, “Look at the brushstrokes.” Eventually one realized that even where he varied the image from tangibly abstract to representational, the brushstrokes not only unified the painting, but opened the door to the ‘pure mind’ of the artist.

 

            Where brushstroke is not necessarily self-evident, we can commonly enter motif through ‘pure’ color, apart from any representational forms. But wherever we ‘enter’ motif – brushstroke, color, line and so forth – we proceed toward the core nature of a higher conversation.

            We were not born with an ear for this conversation. It must be learned. And the learning involves qualitative shifts in awareness.

 

 

 – Jeremy

 

 

        

 

                                                    again the story

                                                    of the Angelic vision

                                                    in forest & old stone

                                                    ruin – the great neglect,

                                                    the glistening promise,

                                                    it all moves inevitably

                                                    toward that broken

                                                    castle

 

                                                    what is reclaimed cannot

                                                    be assessed against the

                                                    early narrative as

                                                    cause :  everything fits

                                                    together now, but the

                                                    causes are still

                                                    unrevealed

 

        

        

[The Critic speaks. Could it be for the last time?] It only seems natural that someone raised in Los Angeles, but an émigré in New Zealand, should challenge the concluding shibboleth of the New York art market.<< MORE >>

Gods and Angels, gods and Angels: such creatures I never expected to discuss.<< MORE >>

Before I went mad with the Cards, I thought the world was simple enough. Two or three principles should hold it together. A matter. A cause. Some kind of formulaic appurtenance pointing to a linking principle at the center. One shouldn’t quibble over words like God and Science, seeing their ultimately interchangeable nature at the center of the worldview. One could pass from congregation to congregation without blinking, so long as one remembered the native dialect: this here; that there. A reasonably good living so long as one kept to the appropriate script.<< MORE >>

(the Scribe speaks :) Unlike the Poet, I still trouble myself, sometimes, over the words. He said his friend, the Hermit, taught him true spontaneity. And while, as a poet, he felt obliged to maintain his craft, and therefore listened to all language with the same innocent ear, hoping to hear the new in both Art and language, he refused further struggle with the language, assigning that to the early journeywork that sums apprenticeship. << MORE >>

These personae have been there from the beginning. Perhaps the separation - their distinction as separable 'individuals - is a function of the 'external' context, the socio-cultural phenomenology, shall we say, into which our heroes were born - the other land of the Other Land. But that does not obviate their final 'reality The 'fiction' is the lesser world.<< MORE >>

[my farewell for Joe and Reed
and prayer for peace for
Ashley and those near her]

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                ‘Celeste’

 

 

                                    the rain reminds me of death

                                                                        celeste

                                                she who weeps without sorrow

                                                who waters the earth with her tears

 

                                    death, the dance of spirit –

                                                            each recreates his own inner world

 

                                                                                    where nothing was

                                                            he builds his city of crystal

                                                his temple of light – Jerusalem

                                                                        stone by stone

 

                                                            mountain by mountain

                                    the jeweled floor of heaven reappears

                                                in this pristine emptiness

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                    – Jeremy

 

 

 

        

oil 24x30"

Joe was a political Activist and participated in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, where he was an observer in a Peace community in Columbia.  He was also an elections observer in El Salvador and worked in local communities there.  The community of La Loma in El Salvador named a school after him.  For family here in the US this was a particularly heartfelt and appreciated honor.  He participated in many protests at Fort Benning, Georgia, where the School of Americas was in operation.  He spent 3 months in a Federal Prison once as a result of  his protest.  He is missed.

        

 

 

                                                                                                    poet & knight

 

 

 

                                                                    poet & knight –

                                                                    who invokes whom? –

                                                                    steel born and the one

                                                                    brought, not by words, but

                                                                    by the intention of words –

                                                                    the blind Symbol that

                                                                    rules fate like a slave,

                                                                    bound to the wheel he

                                                                    creates, the wheel he

                                                                    turns: the mind – the

                                                                    inchoate blind receiver

                                                                    belies its asseverating

                                                                    shadow as the

                                                                    fractionating

                                                                    world

 

 

 

                                                                                        – Jeremy

 

 

        

To my cloud of gentle readers and evergrowing public, I extend my heartfelt appreciation for the numberless notes of concern on my extended absence, but I was not ill or distracted, except by concern for the dauntless Perceval and his world. If he is the double, he nevertheless dwells on the other side of the mirror. And since it is in the nature of the mirror that it moves, we must first of all define the land – establish the map – for the world in which Perceval travels and acts.<< MORE >>

        

Well,  I'm calling the painting of Eve M finished and will frame it and show it to my gallery person here in Bisbee.  I'm going to put up the finished version first then follow it with the one I posted a few of weeks ago for comparison's sake.





the previous state...

        

My work is grounded in
what I call the aesthetics of spontaneity. 
Each brushstroke,
each variation of tone,
each texture
has value and contributes
to the overall composition.
 By remaining in the moment,
spontaneous,
and without concept,
I create work which is a balance
of the subject (motif),
 the medium,
and my Own thought and feeling (personality).  This balance
is what I strive for
and value
in Art.

        

www.williamderaymond.net/rw.html


I am gonna grind away till I can't grind away no more.....

        

 ...just got to keep it cool....

        

This one I did at the chiricahua national monument.  It is approx. 24x30".  If you have a mind this place will blow it.  It is one of the nation's well kept secrets.  This I painted from a view on the echo canyon trail which is about 5 mi trail that winds thru the rocks down to the floor of the forest and back up again.  Just awe inspiring...




this next  one I am just finishing up. again approx. 24x30 on a wood panel.   I am working from  a photo which I don't usually do.  It is giving me this strange sense of peace and relaxation to be working from the photo.  maybe this is a sign of age, and a respite from the tremendous energy it takes to work plein air...it is a view of Bisbee from Tombstone canyon rd above Bisbee looking back.  It is Mexico in the distance...





 

        

am not actually finished, I have been fine tunig....

        

I felt that it was tio hard to get some of the 'Crazy Baby' poem so for now and until I get it properly sound engineered, I have unpublished it.  Soon I hope to have it back up.  M y apologies!  My thanks to Reed's brother Doug Fry for the permiossion to post these renderings!

Played: 745 | Download | Duration: 00:04:23

        

I recently read the biography of Renoir by his son, Jean Renoir.  His was, no doubt, an interesting life.  This turn of the century time of 1800s to 1900s.  The turn from a life more based on agrarian life to the industrial/technological. 
     One of the most striking things to me about the things he said, when speaking on art, was  He actually spoke of the eternal nature of things and spoke of eternity when discussing art and culture. Go figure. 
It was something of a comfort to hear that resonance from such a distinguished brother...I had somehow assumed that he and his cohorts were more instinctively expressing those truths, when in fact they were conscious of these things...anybody out there?
       A Renoir anecdote...When he was still a teenager, he was making good money painting on plates.  Enough so he could afford to buy his parents a house!  Machines came along that could mass produce these images on the plates and the factory where he worked was going to close.  He got the owner to stay open, by convincing him they could compete with the machines.  They managed to come in competitively with the price of the machined plates.  Then, he found the merchants wouldn't buy the hand painted plates because each one had differences in the painting, where as the machine 'painted' each plate the same.  The factory closed.  Go figure.
    Anyway Renoir, in his own and often brilliant life was an heroic figure and the book, by Jean (who by the way was the famous director of movies) is an excellent doorway into a very exquisite and tragic period of history and transition into the 20th
Century as well as into the life of this man and his family.

        

      The 20^thC and its conceptual moorings of consciousness have gone a long way to  distorting the understanding of originality in the art. I am struggling thru the movie Pollock (never did get thru finally) where Ed Harris is playing Pollock. I am able to watch for a few minutes until I begin to get physically ill at the bullshit of that art scene and the depth of the pretension, the awful position artists are put in and put themselves in, in order to gain market recognition, is a vision of hell manifest.

If we look at the 20^th C specifically, we see the tremendous drive to establish one's originality as conceptual reality. In other words who can come up with that visual 'idea' that someone with some marketplace power can then turn into glamour and dollars. This results in phenomona like Andy Warhol having someone piss on his canvas or someone putting shit in a jar. Well, Michelangelo is soooooo retro....Anyway here's Jackson Pollock and historians can say with all seriousness, 'he was the first painter to go beyond the 'brush' '. So much for painting. Oh yeah,and that tortured soul Pollock finally ends his life and the life of others in a drunken expression of driving.

Anyway this 20^th C idea of originality is passe' not Michelangelo. The truth of originality is that you are already original. You simply must approach your motif with your own heart, mind and eyes and paint. Not 'try' to be different. Do you try to be different when you write with a pen? Do you constantly think about 'how' you are going to use your thumb when you try to do something with your hands. It is the very lack of concern about originality that in fact imbues a work with originality.  One must be present and see the medium mainfest its beauty thru their act of painting, then stay out of the way of that beauty....

So the 20^th C gives the history of art the depths of pretension when it comes to spirit and art, and after all, art, that is, the real stuff, is the spiritual body of the culture. The transmission of consciousness we give to our descendents as cultural heritage.

Now. We can look thru all the conceptual experiments with the medium the 20^th C has to offer and begin to see the waste land of the culture. Just like the devastation to the environment, just like the corruption in politics and the corruption in business as manifested in the Wall Street bailout, the corruption in the art is the substitution of concept for spirit. We come full circle in this seeing. We step into the truth of who we are and create from direct experience of visual reality, in our own way, UNselfconsciously.

Look at the period of 'impressionism'. This is real modernism. Check it out. Monet, Pissaro, Sisley, Gauguin, Van Gogh,   Letrec, Manet, Degas, Morisot, Cezanne, Renoir, to name some of the more famous. But look at their work. They all knew each other. How is it that Van Gogh can paint a still Life of Flowers and Apples and have it be so profound? Why does It not look like a still life painted by Gauguin or Monet, or Cezanne. How is it that they all remain individually brilliant when so many fall short. It is for the very reason that modernism is in fact modernism. They remain themselves and paint directly, not out of some concept. They are neither neo-modern or neo-classical. They are in truth original. This is the doorway to painting at whatever level. The direct expression of the individual in relation to to the motif, expressed in terms of painting, ie.Brush, color, and motif, ie. The artform. See with your own eyes. Paint with your own thought and feeling directly, without concern for the future audience.

        

i have been working on some new galleries at www.williamderaymond.net/dapr.html
The idea is to make some money to help with just getting by, so...
I am putting up drawings and etchings and engravings at very reasonable and affordable prices. And... by the way even on any of my paintings which you might like to have but feel are out of your price range, I will make payment arrangements that will fit ANY budget!  Tell your friends.  Why not?
Really, I want and need people to collect my work. I want people and need people to be art collectors. This is a basic human need and is all about being functional in a functional, and creative, and intelligent, and feeling culture.
     Anyway, check out this newly uploaded work, and add to your art collection, or start one today!  At the least enjoy perusing my 'stuff'.  Even download and print if you care to.  These drawings and prints should print out rather close to the original.  But, there is never anything like the original.  Okay!

From Gallery 2- one of my 'automatic' drawings ...



from gallery 3 - drypoint - 'the blues singer' -edition of 25

        

So the map extends.<< MORE >>

 

        

Isn’t it about time America shed its pseudo-history. Historians have exploded the myth of the isolated frontiersman. But every wingnut, abuser and basically violent soul still points to the second amendment of the Constitution as justification for antisocial and pathological behavior, if not outright savagery. The aura of violence created by the second amendment has cost us public figures from presidents to rock stars, not to mention thousands and tens of thousands on the streets every year.<< MORE >>

[Yes, another critical commentary piece. So I lied: I’m a poet.] -- Those of us earning less than the median income know that the death panels are already in place and operating. They are called private insurers. << MORE >>