It has four different sides. The color is so brilliant it doesn’t reproduce well in a photo, but you can get the idea from the image here.

The Last Soldiers of Love by Tony Magistrale

Literary Laundry Press 2011

Half inch thick glass, transparent ink, lit from behind in a dark room. A 10 inch LED clip on edge light is on order from Lumenedge that will put light directly into the glass, with both a remote, dimmer, on off switch. How to frame this is the project of the week. It will work as a “lamp” to dimly light a room from the wall, or perhaps as a glass shade around a bulb.

Worked on putting a lot of texture into the sky rather than a smooth gradation of color. I’ll try this again on another today.

Participation

When I draw, what I see is influenced by everything I’ve seen in the past, by what I choose to look at and not look at, and by the totality of my proclivities and predilections. Such influences impact everyone who looks at the world, whether they draw or not. There is a kind of trickery or illusory quality about it all that makes the very act of seeing itself suspect. Those of us who draw often change the image over and over again to find what we are looking for, to make it look right. For those who reflect on this process it can be disorienting to grasp how fluid the truth of what we see and know really is. How much of what I draw is inside my head? How much is outside? And how much of the world itself is inside my head, and how much outside? Drawings and paintings can provide partial answers to these kinds of questions. Such images are, in part, fragments of our past and momentary present, snapshots of our inner world.

The Rainbow and the Eye

This afternoon I am sitting in my backyard after a rainstorm, looking towards the Green Mountains to the east and painting an image of what I see. There is a rainbow arcing from the top of a distant ridge on my left over to a field on the right. It is a perfect half circle and the translucent haze of it overlaps a portion of the mountain behind. I try and capture in paint the diffuse nature of these colors over the landscape. Cadmium red and orange, Hansa yellow, Ultramarine blue and mixtures of these basic colors will suffice I think.

Reflecting upon the scene, I realize the rainbow isn’t really there. It is the net result of the rain, the sun and the lens in my eye, which diffracts the light into the arc of colors inside my head. If my eyes were not there, the rainbow would vanish. It would be there for anyone else’s eyes of course, for all eyes have lenses. It would even be there for the lens of a camera, or for the eyes of birds or animals that glance at it, if they notice it at all, for their eyes all have lenses as well. But without a lens it doesn’t exist. Before there were eyes in the world, there were no rainbows. Whoever looks at a rainbow, participates with the rain and the sun in creating it, like our televisions, smart phones and computers detect invisible electromagnetic radiation, and from it create images on a screen. This is so for everything we see, not just the rainbow. We participate in creating the world we look at.

The Wave and the Ear

I’ve set my easel up on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Large waves crash onto the rocks below and the roaring sound rushes up at me as water settles over the jagged shoreline. A mixture of titanium white, cerulean blue and a bit of veridian on my canvas approximates the color of seawater, with more white for the foam. I hear the shrieks of gulls circling over the shallows. As I get older, what I hear going on in the world slowly diminishes. It is being replaced by ringing tones generated in my brain, remnants of a long ago explosion, that tend to drown out the sounds of rain falling, birds singing, and waves crashing. I can increase the volume control on my hearing aids to help correct for this, but it is a solution with diminishing returns. As I get older the sounds of the world continue to diminish and the sounds inside my head keep increasing. If I go deaf, there will be no external sound. If there are no ears at all, anywhere, to hear what we call sound, then there would be none. Sound needs an ear. It is the result of events that cause air particles to compress and expand through space. Our ears detect this expansion and compression and generate what we call sound. We participate in the production of a sound filled world – event, air, and ear. Before ears, the world was silent.

The Tree and the Hand

I’m sketching a line of trees alongside a road that stretches out in front of me. They appear to diminish in size the farther down the road I look. Images from trees far away take up less space on the back of my retina, and so appear smaller. My brain corrects for this illusion. I “know” the trees are all the same size. Reproducing this size reduction in my two-dimensional sketch of trees produces the illusion of depth.

I reach out with my hand and touch the trunk of the closest tree and feel it outside myself. This is partly an illusion, though it doesn’t feel at all that way. There is something out there of course, but it is far from what I perceive and call a tree. I am an active participant in creating the tree, by naming it, and by my past experiences with all the trees and forests I’ve seen before, sketched and read about. More importantly, I also create the tree simply by being there and sensing it. I am the fish, swimming in water, unaware of what holds me up. There is no such thing as unfelt solidity, only particles again, in the air far apart, and in the tree, close together. I reach into the world to touch and delineate where the edge of the far apart and close together meet. I see inside my head the shape of where this is and call it a tree. I hear the leaves the air has moved, and thus construct the wind. I create what I know, reaching out with eyes, ears and hands to experience myself within the world.

Journals and Sketchbooks – Creative Spaces

For many decades I’ve kept journals and sketchbooks where I’ve written thoughts and drawn images of landscapes, people and objects around home and when traveling. The journals also contain hand drawn maps and outlines, designs, research plans, rough sketches for paintings, as well as drafts of papers and books that I’ve written and am writing currently. I’ve also used my journals for many other things as well, like problem solving, designing workshops and demonstrations in schools, creating exhibits, planning laboratory projects with my graduate students, and making drawings and illustrations for lectures and presentations. The journals are where I write and draw, to learn and create. Many of the thoughts and images in chapters to follow have their origins in the content of these journals.

Morning Commute II, 16 x 20, Acrylic on Canvas