Be the Great Fool

It's been a while since I've written.  Last year was about others, in friendship, relationships, and work.  From volunteering in Nepal (Click here for the photos), to crazy road trips visiting loved ones (Pit-Stop #1, #2, #3, #4, #5), or with the ones I love.  If I wasn't traveling, my time was spend working in which case I made a website and a magazine.  All in all, I forgot to take time for myself.  This year is about regaining sacred space, and in tribute to that I will be working on a songbird series.  To get started I've been working on sketches.

This year has lots of promising and exciting adventures, from sending applications to festivals, possibly moving to another state, to finishing the anticipated Nepal film, to learning another language, and moving out of the country.  And in all of this, remembering to paint.  Many thing depend on a tiny little string of a plan, all of which could easily be broken.  Even if these things do or do-not happen, luckily I'm good at riding the wave.  So far this year has been extraordinarily freeing, and by re-focusing myself, I can then fulfill the goals and promises I've made to myself and others.  In other words, I know what my dream is and I'm well on my way to making it happen.  However, sometimes the universe has things to teach you and the side-paths are sometimes a necessary course.

This was all lead up to because of a comment I received from a person my friend met on the bus going from Bellingham WA to Vanouver BC.  She mentioned to him that she was down visiting a friend, and his remark was "The one with the great walk? Even if she doesn't know where she is going, she must get there with confidence." 

I do, often.  I'm not a planner, but I still do more then most.  And my life has turned into a series of moments that are more then just coincidence.  Being that during my friend's visit we read a book called Einstein's dreams, it was another one of those moments that are a bit too perfect when we were spending time in a used book store flipping to random pages and reading aloud, when we came to this snippet...

The fool is the most potent of the archetypes and also the most capable teacher of crazy wisdom. There are actually two types of fool: the foolish fool and the great fool. The foolish fool is inept and silly, a clown of the mind. The great fool is wise beyond ordinary understanding. The foolish fool is the one we see every day when we look in the mirror or walk down the street. The great fool is the rarest of beings.

Innocence is the trademark of both fools. The innocence of the foolish fool makes him clumsy and unsophisticated because he tries to live according to convention. The great fool, however, does not try to fit in; in his innocence, he lives by his own rules.  The foolish fool and his money are soon parted, but the great fool gives his money away. The foolish fool always gets lost, while the great fool is at home everywhere.  The great fool has different values then the rest of us and therefore is crazy wisdom's master of ceremony.

Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions

The great fool, like Einstein, wonders about the obvious and stands in awe of the ordinary, which makes him capable of revolutionary discoveries about space and time. The great fool lives outside the blinding circle of routine, remaining open to the surprise of each moment.  We are the foolish ones, complacent I our understanding.  We take for granted the miraculous dance of creation, but the great fool continuously sees it as if for the first time.  The revelations of the great fool often shows us where we are going, or-more often- where we are.

 My only thought to the man's complement, "The great fool is never lost".  I will find my way, wherever that may be.

Rockenbach Productions

In preparation for starting a company, I thought it suitable to design a logo.  It is based on a goldfish named Honeydew.

It was when I was sitting in my kitchen talking to my fish when I realized that he would make a perfect logo.  I'm not sure what instinct told me that, but I decided to go with it.

It wasn't unti later I finished the drawing that I looked up some information on fish/goldfish as a totem. Here is what I found:

Fish:

Independence, Potential, Adaptation Fish can teach us to adapt to all environments; they can teach us to streamline our lives; they can give us protection when we need it; and connect us to the creative element of life: water.

A Fish swimming down symbolizes the involution of spirit, while a Fish swimming up is the evolution of the spirit. They reveal the strength of the currents of our lives and  see clearly in the murky waters of the future. When Fish entered your life as a Totem, it will often signal one of the senses being awakened: visions, prophetic dreams, or clairaudience is possible. There will be greater contact with the spiritual realm. Goldfish: This Totem brings peace and prosperity to those who have it.  Look for new opportunities and take advantage of them.

Cool, its a good thing I listen to my intuition. Goldfish:

This is what the drawing looks like.  I use this as a template to create a Vector image that I can safely use for any occasion.

At one point I though having a more graphic oriented image would be better, but the translation from drawing to vector became sloppy.  This is still a Vector image, but with less of a blur.  I was happy with this translation and might keep it around for a while.

Totem Animal Series pt1

I enjoy an absurd amount of detail.  So anytime I get a small pen in my hand, craziness ensues.

A little while ago, I started asking people what their favorite animals are.  I will be working on this series until I've given out all the completed images.

Drawing at the Reggae Bar- pt. 1

The first few days were a little difficult.  I was having a hard time even making marks, turns out I was thinking too much.  Even after all this time out of school, it always takes a little while to get your creativity back.  This is just a start.

First drawing of the night, was trying to loosen up and just make something.  I am working only from  memory, I do not have a model to help with proportions and anatomy.

After finishing the first drawing, I felt like I had finally warmed up to start a second.

It eventually lead to this.

I am restricting myself is to work with only pen.  Working with pencil allows the artist to fuss over detail to the point where its never good enough and the drawing never gets completed.  By only using pen, even if I don't like an area I have to work with it anyways.  Besides, I have to remind myself that it's just a sketchbook, nothing needs to be perfect.

Ankor Wat at Siem Reap, Cambodia

Horses at Ankor Wat 

Shrines for Buddhas within the Temples

Elephant rides

Bayon Temple

It was a long hike to the top.

I found a place of solitude.

Around the temple, fallen stones have been re-stacked in random order. 

Many of the temples are made with sandstone, so there are many intricate designs that have worn away. 

Shrine at top of Ta Keo.  Extremely long and steep steps to the top of worn down and crumbling sandstone.

This was one of the many girls that tryed to sell me something, she was waiting at the top of  Ta Keo.  I hung out with her and drew a picture that we colored together and I let her keep.  Afterward I gave her my color pencils as a present.

This was the temple I really wanted to see, Ta Prohm.  Its overgrow with trees.  There were a lot of tourists at this spot.  I went wandering inside the temple and found a guy who was willing to show me into some forbidden areas.  Right then my camera batterie died.  I finished my illegal tour and made it a goal to come back the next day.

Today I toured myself into the depths of the temple to see what I could find.

I found this badboy.

This was the doorway I had to scramble through.

This is where I continued to run around on top the roof.

They always start out small....

And then get big!

I was taking blurry pictures of monkeys, when a car pulled over and some girls throw the monkey a bunch of bananas.  The started to eat the bananas, spitting half of it out, then decided to hijack their car.  This was the only good pictures, damn guys never want to pose.

This was the drawing I worked on when I had found my spot.  I sat through the morning and worked on it.  One of the "Tour Guilds" came and watched me draw for a little while before scampering off to find his next customer.

How to use Color Pencil

The new video I created for my mom is how to use color pencil (I would like to spell it colour because its in my nature to be defiant, but my auto correct doesn't seem to like it.) The point to these videos are to post free art lessons online so people will be more encouraged to try and create their own art. Its been a fun experiment and I've learned a lot. Considering I never went to school or had lessons on how to film or work on editing software, I think I'm doing pretty good.

However, my mom is a painter, and has never really dedicated herself to mastering the art of color pencil. That was my thing. In high school I would carry around a box of some 96 different colors so as to better be able to ignore my teachers when I was in public school. That said, I was able to put in a lot of hours on learning how to use this material to its fullest.

That's why, in this video, even though it my mom introducing the tutorial, it ultimately was I who colored the image. She tried to get me to do the whole thing, but there was no way I was getting in front of that camera. In the end, I think it turned out okay.

Some of the images I used to color in 9th and 10th grade:

Free Hand Mandala Drawing of Dragons

I know that not everybody believes in reincarnation, but I'm pretty sure that in my last life I was a Buddhist sand mandala painter. I had been getting a sneaking suspicion that I was Asian, but I couldn't tell where, when, or what. The signs were everywhere. When I was born I couldn't pronounce my 'L's, they instead came out as 'R's which eventually forced me to change my name from Lily to Sky. As a little kid my mom would chant along with her Tibetan bowls, while she did this I would try to approach without being herd and crawl into her lap cross legged. There I would sit in silence while she did her ritual. Around my teens I adopted my signature clouds that appear in almost every picture I made, which is very reminiscent of the clouds found in Japanese landscape paintings. As time goes on, I've accumulated many trinkets that are part of Asian culture, leaving my living space as a life sized shrine. One of my favorites is a carved green jade necklace I bought in China Town in Vancouver BC of a Dragon and a Phoenix intertwined. Some people wear crosses, other people wear crystals.

Having been born in 88, I identify myself with the Dragon proudly. Now, in 2012, as we approach the Chinese New Year I anxiously await to see what crazy adventures it will bring. On January first as a pranced around the streets of Vancouver with a most beloved friend, I stumbled across my favorite magazine, Common Ground. This months title being "Year of the Dragon." Once I had arrived back home and settled in, I opened the magazine to figure out what wisdom I could find, this is what I read;

On January 23rd, 2012, we move out of the Chinese Year of the Rabbit into the prosperous and fertile Year of the Dragon. Dragons represent potent and benevolent power as the ultimate ruler of all the elements, embodying primordial power as a catalyst for change and transformation, wisdom, infinity, longevity, and movement through space.

It is critical that we adopt our way of living to eliminate out-of-date practices that hinder the brilliant future of our planet, our Galaxy and the entire universe. Research undertaken by cosmologist and inventor Nassim Haramein has created a "Unified Field Theory." (I have posted the video below) This information can change our lives on earth dramatically, as it unlocks deep levels of understanding of human existence through an exploration of the geometric structure of the universe and human consciousness.

The unified field is the space we occupy. No matter how big or small, all matter we observe is made of atoms and all atoms are of 99.99999999% space. Physicists use math to describe the universe and the nature of relativity through the language of equations. We can improve our understanding of the fundamentals of our universe when we understand the geometry of the fabric of the vacuum and the dynamics of space-time within that structure.

This is a critical period of our evolution where we can come into coherency and harmony with nature instead of destroying our environment as we interact with it and transform our society from scarcity consciousness to abundance.

We live in the perfect organization of a holographic and non-linear fractal universe structure. We are a reflection of the abundance of mother earth; like her , we are self sustaining. The anxiety we feel as human race is a direct result of the stress of living within the confines of a box of a closed system. Stress can be better defined as the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of misinformation and acceptance of living within the confines of a mistaken identity as limited beings confined within a limited structure. There are no closed systems in nature. What appears to be an isolated system is actually connected to an infinite potential of the entire universe.

Our society, as a whole, tends to embrace looking out-side of ourselves for answers, based on expansion and radiation instead of contraction - exploding fuel-filled rockets instead of floating hot air balloons.

The Year of the Dragon is a perfect opportunity to break out of the box in our search for creative solutions by going towards the center and using our intuition to find answers from within. We are invincible if we harness our collective power to command our energies toward the inevitability of a peaceful harmonious existence, through breakthroughs in enlightenment rather then disaster.

When most people read articles, I'm sure they take in the words for what they are. But the morning that I read this an image flashed into my head. A mandala to be more precise. I've painted two Mandalas in my life. One of the painting I still have, the other was given away to two wonderful friends for their wedding. Both contained the Shri Yantra. I never got to document the one I gave away, but I do have this picture as evidence.

This time the Mandala I envisioned did not contain the Shri Yantra, but instead the Cuboctahedron, with four dragons in each corner to represent the four elements/directions. Now, I know that in the last month I posted this video a few times, but if you have not seem it, now is the time. This is the video Nassim Haramein made about his "Unified Field Theory," and it has been influencing me this whole year. I've always had a love for geometry, but this video is what justified my obsession.

Nassim Haramein - Black Whole from Milo on Vimeo.

If you want to skip forward to the geometrics, start the video from 51 mins in. When I was 13, I drew the star tetrahedron inside seven consecutive circles, the "seed of life." I had to wait until I was 18 to get this tattooed on my back. 8 of these star tetrahedrons combined create a larger cubeoctahedron structure. When I watched this video, it defiantly blew my mind.

So when this image appeared in my head, I immediately put down the magazine and went a grabbed one pencil, an eraser and a stack of cheap paper. From there, I sat at my kitchen counter, and free handed this:

Later that night I enlarged the image on a photocopier. From there I traced the image on a light table with a black extra fine rolling ball pen. No rulers, no measuring, just a really steady hand and a good eye. This was what it looked liked:

I then took the liberty to fill in some details:

So today I spent my time typing this, and trying to color the image. I havn't really moved from the kitchen counter in 10 hours. My first love was Primsacolor pencils, I think they still might be. For most people, they don't have the patience to deal with color pencils. It takes a long time to slowly shade all the colors together and complete an area. I love it. I don't care for the instant gratification that painting brings, big brushes and paint strokes seem sporadic and sloppily done. There is a type of controlled perfection that comes with a well done color pencil drawing, its just the way I am. And this is what you can do with it if you have the patience:

Now that you've seen the result, lets go back to the beginning. I think in my last life I was a Buddhist Sand Mandala Painter. All the pieces make sense, the obsession with these images, my urge to paint them repeatedly, and the ability to gracefully create them without the use of measuring tools. I know that this isn't something I can put on my resume, and I'm sure very few people really even care. But the fact that I can spend my time being happy to create something that bring joy and fulfillment to my life is a unique gift that only artists have. And I use the tern artist loosely to encompass anyone that has the urge to make something. Whether it be cooking, writing, singing, doodling, building, anything! I urge every single person to find something that fills their heart with something golden, because now is better then ever to make yourself happy.