Arborglyph: (1 symbol P) The Life of Pi, [...]]]>

Arborglyph: (1 symbol P) The Life of Pi, © 2005 Linda C Everson

Just a FEW WORDS in my artwork that convey all the THOUGHTS, FEELINGS, AND VISUAL IMAGES that I got from that incredible Life of Pi story are:  sink, ship, swells, shelter, sunshine, sharks, selfish, sacred, sacrifice, security, religion, reality, reason, routine, passage, predator, protect, fear, fish, fight, hope, horizon, zebra, zoo, alpha, omega, animal, instinct, illusions, illumination, meerkats, map, world, wet, waves, wind, weary, wish, will, deprivation, danger, delirium, determination, dignity, dolphins, death, darkness, think, threaten, territory, trials, tiger, teamwork, taming, and … TAMING THE TIGER!

The multiple levels of humor and seriousness, life and death, animal instinct and spirituality, god and man, fear and wonder, reality and illusion, self-determination and guidance; are all explored in the book and the movie. You can read or watch Life of Pi many times, questioning, wondering, and gaining more insight.

For a humorous example, the hero, Picene Patel was named after a swimming pool (picene) and in grade school was constantly ridiculed over his name… ‘Pissing Patel’. Cleverly, he changed his name to Pi, a mathematical symbol, which shows you how bright he really was in a challenging situation. His curiosity often got him into major trouble, but also enlightened him with the best attributes of three religions. His beliefs in both multiple gods/one god provided strength for him while stranded at sea for an eternity. Like the Pi symbol whose decimal representation never ends, his lifeboat experience goes on and on…

My use of the Arborglyph – P symbols in my monoprint is reminiscent of both Pi’s name and also the CHI RHO CROSS. I wanted to convey both a sense of mystery and a spiritual element. Interestingly, the Chi Rho Cross was supposedly used by Constantine in a major battle over territory and helped him accomplish a difficult win over his enemy. Another account “credits his victory to divine intervention”. In the Life of Pi, Pi (Picene) is also faced with major hurdles to survive in a small territory that both he and his enemy (Richard Parker the tiger) want to claim. Was it self will power or divine intervention that helped Pi survive? While Constantine saw his Chi Rho symbol in the sky, Pi also saw wonders of the almighty maker through the beauty of the sea and the sky, which was superbly portrayed in the Ang Lee movie. The turquoise waters and the rust colored tiger stripes were gorgeous! It’s a beautiful story told in many ways… a book, a movie, a piece of artwork.

Tell Dan

I visited Israel recently and saw layer upon layer of many different civilizations and religions that inhabited the land. While there I explored Tell Dan in northern Israel and also climbed the tell at Beit She’an to view the excavations below. Archaeology has always been interesting to me.

Beit [...]]]>

Tell Dan

I visited Israel recently and saw layer upon layer of many different civilizations and religions that inhabited the land. While there I explored Tell Dan in northern Israel and also climbed the tell at Beit She’an to view the excavations below. Archaeology has always been interesting to me.

Beit She'an with tell in background

A perfect accompaniment on the trip was The Source by James Michener. It’s a fictitious historical novel about  Tell Makor in northern Israel, where  archaeologists dig through multiple layers of the tell or mound and uncover 10,000 years of civilization. Each layer in the tell unearths artifacts from a previous period in time, and the story then reverts back to that time.

What is particularly interesting in The Source is the evolution of religion and “god”. It starts with Stone Age man and the first glimpses of spirituality; then proceeds with the fertility goddess Astarte and the fertility god/s Baal, describing in detail the various sacrifices and monoliths.  The Cananite deity El eventually evolved into El Shaddai, and then into Yahweh (YHWH), the Hebrew god of Moses and possibly his ancestors. Monotheism (one god) starkly contrasted with the polytheistic (multiple gods) of the Greeks and Romans in later years. 

One of my Arborglyph monoprints is called All Seeing Yahweh. For many Jewish people, the name Yahweh should never be spoken. Therefore, the Tetragrammaton or four  letters YHWH often replaces the name Yahweh.  However it’s possible that:

Hebrew scripts write it as four consonants, rendered in Roman letters as YHWH, due to the fact that most alphabets, prior the Greek alphabet, did not display vowels, and required that vowels be mentally pronounced in the proper places.

And although the name Yahweh should not be spoken, the Jewish Encyclopedia states that The Old Testament had 6,823 references to Yahweh.

Arborglyph: (1 symbol IY) All Seeing Yahweh © 2005. Linda C. Everson. All rights reserved.

Yahweh was a strong, demanding ‘god’ to the Hebrews. The meaning of the word Yahweh has been interpreted as “to be”, or according to WordIQ many scholars believe it means “He Brings into Existence Whatever Exists”. This coincides with a timelessness about ‘gods’ existence. Which gets back to the novel The Source and its prevailing theme of many gods and religions throughout the centuries in Israel.

My Arborglyph monoprint, All Seeing Yahweh has several images with an IY symbol and also contains several ‘tree eyes’; hence the All Seeing title. The “all-seeing eye” has been associated with several other religions or cultures… The “Eye of Horus” in Egypt, the “Eye of the World” in Buddhism and the Christian Trinity.  

The “all-seeing eye of God” is also analagous to the “Eye of Providence” which generally depicts an eye that is sometimes surrounded by a triangle. This “Eye of Providence” is on the Great Seal of the United States and is also a Free Masonry symbol. The eye icon is a powerful image in many cultures and in countless artworks.

However, the current show [...]]]>

When the Denver Art Museum (DAM) opened its new expansion, the Frederic C. Hamilton Building which was designed by Daniel Libeskind; art critics and some viewers complained about the unusual contemporary design. A common complaint of Libeskind’s architecture was that the slanted walls made it difficult to show lots of artwork.

However, the current show Embrace proved them wrong! Seventeen contemporary installation artists were invited to work with this unusual architectural space and it was a huge success in my opinion. The wonderful staircase and atrium in DAM gives the opportunity for the viewers to see several of the installations multiple times in different perspectives, and to see connections between the installations.

The Embrace show is about the dialogue between painting (in a broad scope) and the architecture. In the Embrace catalogue, Christoph Heinrich’s talks about the labyrinthine space, cavern qualities, mazes, and diagonal walls in the Hamilton Building at DAM.

Even in the very beginnings of art, cave painting responded to the shape of stone…with the bison… deriving their volume from the natural projections of the walls on which they were painted.

I found this to be an interesting analogy, having toured many of the ancient cave sites in Europe. Henrich’s discussion about the traditional “white cube” type of museum and the new role of the general public in art appreciation is very interesting. I highly recommend this Embrace catalogue to further understand museums, viewer’s roles, installation art and the artist’s concepts and process. The catalogue has so many great photos of the artists at work, plus their final installations, that you don’t have to see the actual show to learn from it. Unfortunately the show closes April 4, 2010, but the catalogue will still be available.

One of my favorite art books is The Language of Antonio Tapies: Surface and Symbol. Both surface [...]]]>

Artists are often asked what other artists inspire them. Yesterday I was interviewed on www.blogtalkradio.com/annette-coleman in the Artist name names, what artists inspire their work episode. I thought I’d share my thoughts about inspiration in my blog also.

One of my favorite art books is The Language of Antonio Tapies: Surface and Symbol. Both surface (texture) and symbols are a major element of my artwork as well. Antonio Tapies is a Spanish artist who does prints, mixed media paintings, assemblage and sculpture. In the 1950’s he did Matter Paintings in which he used sand, dust, and other materials that suggested fossils, cracks, and fissures. Matiere painting refers to use of texture. Tapies also often used letters, graffiti, and calligraphy- like symbols in his artwork, possibly because he came from a family of bookmakers. In my Arborglyphs series of monoprints, I also use calligraphy-like symbols. Tapies once said, “Art is not decorative, it is a philosophical system or language that contains a total vision of the world”. I like his use of the word “language”. Although my Arborglyph symbols have no specific meaning, they often ‘seem’ to evoke a memory of something in the viewer’s eyes.

I was also inspired by a video about him at the Tapies Foundacio in
Barcelona, Spain. Tapies was filmed walking in his garden, home, alleys and pathways, where he observed what he called “glimpses” of the fairly mundane things. Texture on the cobblestone, scratches on an ancient door, shadows in the garden, or flickering light across a rugged wall. All these so called unimportant close-ups of the world played an important role in his abstract imagery, and I also make the same close-up observations of nature.

If you look at his artwork and at mine, your would probably not see many similarites, yet our visions are fairly similar. We both like surface and texture, both make use of symbols and language in an abstract manner.

When I was at an art festival last summer, I had a viewer look at my artwork for literally 30 seconds, and he exclaimed “I have to buy this!” A decision so quickly! Why?

It turns out that the monoprint he was enamored with had a huge red letter “Z [...]]]>

When I was at an art festival last summer, I had a viewer look at my artwork for literally 30 seconds, and he exclaimed “I have to buy this!” A decision so quickly! Why?

It turns out that the monoprint he was enamored with had a huge red letter “Z ” slashing across the top of the image. And it so happens my client’s nickname is… “Z”. Sometimes art hits you between the eyes just like that!

Arborlyph: Z Zorro

© 2004 Linda C. Everson, All Rights Reserved

“Z” also stands for Zorro, who was the masked character created in 1919 by Johnston McCulley in series The Curse of Capistrano.  Zorro quite often slashed the letter “Z” as his signature. He was a cult hero in multiple magazines, comics, books, films, TV, stage, music, computer and video games.  His name lives on…