Drawing Challenge: Prayer/ Meditation/ Still Point

Indestructible Truth

collage, 6.25 x 6.25 inches

ingredients: vintage ephemera, image transfer, ribbon, azalea blossom, feather


The lovely Tammie Lee of Beauty Flows is hosting this week's drawing challenge, Prayer/ Meditation/ Still Point. As soon as I heard what the theme was, I knew I was in; much of my art revolves around these concepts, so it was right up my alley, as they say.

While I worked on this piece, I asked myself what "indestructible truth" actually means to me in relation to the theme of the drawing challenge. When I come right down to it, the only indestructible truth I know, that I feel sure of in my heart and soul, is that everything in the universe is connected to every other thing. Every human being, every blade of grass, every rock, every animal, every tree. When one thing is affected, it can have far-reaching consequences; this is known as, "the butterfly effect". Here's how Wikipedia describes it: "In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state."  I prefer to meditate/pray while outdoors in nature; that "still point "is the moment I feel that connection, or 'become one with everything'. The experience cannot adequately be described in words.

This reminds me of a joke (and who doesn't love a good Buddhist joke, right?) A Buddhist walks into a vegetarian restaurant to order a veggie burger. The server asks, "What will you have?" The Buddhist replies, "Make me one with everything." (Sorry, I can hear the collective groan, but I just couldn't resist.)


Notes on technique/strategies:
Going back two posts ago, I wrote about strategies for pushing your art to another level. I incorporated a couple of them here, one being the "throw out your first ten ideas"idea. I really didn't keep count, but I threw out a lot of them, because I've developed habits of doing the same things over and over, and I felt the work was getting stale. I also limited my materials, in that I decided not to include any representational objects, unless they were real, such as the flower and the feather. Then, just to make it even more frustrating, I tried to limit the amount of compositional elements, because I've been feeling like my compositions were too busy. That required a great deal of restraint on my part; I just had to keep asking myself, "Will this improve the piece, or not?", and frequently the answer was "No!". As a result, I am happier with this piece than some of the others I've made lately.

Dont't forget to visit Beauty Flows for links to more posts on this drawing challenge!

Art Club + Butterfly Project = Awesome

The art teacher and I sponsor an after-school art club at the middle school where I teach.  I thought the kids might like to make butterflies for the Butterfly Project, an online art collaboration organized by Trudi Sisson of Two Dresses Studio.  All of the butterflies sent to her will be displayed on Trudi's blog, so the students were pretty excited about the prospect of getting to see their creations on the internet.  They couldn't believe their work would someday be on display in the Holocaust Museum in Houston.

We gave them a wide range of media choices, lots of materials, and let them go at it.  All they had to provide was the creativity, and there was certainly no shortage of that!

Here are their creations, ready to send to the Butterfly Project.  How cool is that?  I'm so proud of them!

If you want to join, click "Butterfly Project" above, or you can click the icon on my side bar.  Happy flying!


I was just notified by Seth Apter of  The Altered Page that my entry will be featured in today's posting of  Collector's Edition: Chapter 7.  This is part of a huge ongoing series of collaborative online art projects that Seth dreamed up and has been coordinating for some time now, called The Pulse: The State of the Art. I'm so grateful to be a part of this amazing project, as well as a part of the online art community it chronicles.  There is lots of cool artists' stuff  featured today, so get on over there and check it out!

The Butterfly Effect, and Junkmail

 Ingredients:  Rives BFK, Thai unruyu paper, vintage music book page, vintage ledger, 

vintage postage stamps, acrylic ink, Caran d'Ache crayons, ephemera, watercolor pencil.

The butterfly effect is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory; namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. Although this may appear to be an esoteric and unusual behavior, it is exhibited by very simple systems: for example, a ball placed at the crest of a hill might roll into any of several valleys depending on slight differences in initial position. The butterfly effect is a common trope ( figurative language) in fiction when presenting scenarios involving time travel and with "what if" cases where one storyline diverges at the moment of a seemingly minor event resulting in two significantly different outcomes.  -Wikipedia

The implications of this theory are huge and wide-ranging, so I won't go into them here.  But it does beg the question: Does every action we take really have the potential to influence the world?  Whether it does or not, perhaps we should consider living our lives as if it does.  Because if we did, we might live more thoughtfully, more carefully, more in harmony with everything and everyone.

What got me thinking about this was a post I came across at Trudi Sissons's Two Dresses Studio.   Here's a bit of Trudi's wonderful introduction to The Butterfly Effect OPEN, a project of the Holocaust Museum Houston, in Texas.

 

The Butterfly Project mandate is to remember the 1,500,000 innocent children who perished as a result of the Holocaust  by collecting 1.5 million handmade butterflies. In Spring 2013, these butterflies will then become a breath-taking exhibition to serve as a memory of this event.

The idea of using butterflies to symbolize the children came from this touching poem, written by a 23 year old man living in a Jewish ghetto, who later died at Auschwitz.

I Never Saw Another Butterfly

The last, the very last,

So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow
Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing
against a white stone....

Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly ’way up high.
It went away I’m sure
because it wished
to kiss the world good-bye.

 For seven weeks I’ve lived in here
Penned up inside this ghetto.
But I have found what I love here.
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut branches in the court.

Only I never saw another butterfly.
That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don’t live in here, in the ghetto.

Written  by Pavel Friedman, June 4, 1942 

 

Please go to her post to read the details. She has graciously volunteered to collect and send the butterflies to the museum for us.  You can also see all the butterflies that have been collected thus far- really an amazing display.


Here's another small way to make a difference.  Junk mail is something that always makes me angry.  Why should trees be cut down, energy and resources wasted, to send me things I DON'T WANT?  It seems I get the same catalogs and ads over and over; I swear, some advertisers must send out mailings every week!  It also boggles my mind to think how much profit they must be making if they can afford to spend the kind of money it undoubtedly costs to print and mail all of this junk. So I was intrigued when I saw this postcard:

 

I'm going to try to do this, if only to aid in increasing  awareness of the junk mail problem, as well as contributing to what will surely be an interesting array of art made from recycled materials.  I enlarged this card as much as I could so that you could read it, and participate if you want to; you could win something, too.  For more information, go here.  I'll post my junk mail when I finish it.

Happy affecting, my friends!