Tag: color

Meditations on Color

by M. Murphy ©2019

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“Finger Puppet” photo by Marty Murphy

If you could only see

The colors noise makes

Stroboscopic pulses melting

The projected penumbra fades

Off in the webs of energy threads

 

Yellow brown lies

The Gerber orange cuisine

Masking putrescent truth

That green worm-mass-face

It’s anything but serene

 

Yellow brown haze

As piss and shit

Shout red mandates tightly bound

In the wet black ink stained fingers

Choking round impotent necks

 

Siphoned oily green drops of life’s blood

Rain pulses pelting my brain

 

Yellow brown fog

Embezzle cloaked pillars of a white empire

Engulfed in drowning swallows

From the red stained eyes

Driven through the heart by fragments of the one true cross

The brights skim along the surface

Dancing yellows and bright blue whites

Piercing shrieks tighten my eyes

Shut with winching little stabs

Sometimes feel really good

 

Wanton fat needy arms

Purple wrap lavender lilac

Texture rich lustful bathing

In the open arms of eternity’s embrace

A return to the source with grace

 

Aural presence

Boreal essence

Make rainbow forests before my eyes

Rooted in the opaque gray of twin hemispheres

Navigating upward ever onward in clear reflecting waters

 

Her voice the sweet siren song

Soft pink candy serenade

Melts the world for pale golden petals

Upon velvet beds of earthen greens

In a patchwork maze to claim cat’s cradle

I am not overly fond of the color red, in fact, I can’t fucking stand its overuse in fashion. Little tidbits and complimentary nuances are great, but if you want to be avoided completely, wear an entire red outfit. If you delve in to wearing all rust colors, like oxidation, consider it as another sign of desperation, danger, death, and decay.

Commercially produced reds have always been meant to stimulate whether you ingest, or relate to integrate, you are a consumer.

Red leaves in the Fall shore-are-purdy and all, but if you could hear their season long wailing and screams as they die an agonizing choking death, we may behold such grandeur of demise in humbled awe; and we applaud their starvation.

We stopped looking for the signs of changing times, when colors turn away, and the world befalls to gray, color is a revolutionary act.

Rich green forests are in my genes that have been ripped open and rearranged to accommodate the nature of nature. Listening, and singing along with the deepness of infinite green on green upon green after green. Silvers and golds juxtapose the layered pose that Ansel Adams could only compose in black and white.

Green makes me feel like a chameleon, or a salamander living in a bad ass array of ancient rocks beside a stream where I catch all sorts of tasty treats to keep the balance, to keep things neat.

Green makes me think of water so blue because of the sky, like it was handing out free samples of cosmetics. A green so blue, nobody could have painted on an upper eyelid any better and make it any clearer.

The gold lame’ shine of Elvis somehow changes the luster and neon glow of life below the surface; The Liberace gemstone smile lights the way for innocent pink puffy pastels pouting out sweet Welk’s prose to describe brown molded stains of repression.

Hee-Haw the sickly-green institutional yellow pee-stained hay bales litter a set of values dressed up in red, white, and blue crisscrossed plaid. Nestled in the cleavage valley where all roads lead to the deep, dank, humid, golden honeysuckle-south; dripping in the colored blood of generations and tokens of esteem held in such deep regard, deserved of their own private vaults buried in the barren brown earth.

Hot pink solid mods and lime green rages across the screen begging for someone to come and play in the land of yellow submarines, blue meanies, and the red blood of dying soldiers securing the futures of the rich investment portfolios, tucked in to the pockets of slick-oil-fire-stained-hand-buffed-animal-skin wallets.

Plainly stated; I love color. I also have synesthesia; the condition that causes the brain to process data in the form of several senses at once. For me, colors are paired with sounds. Also, people, other living and non-living things emit colors, and sounds or tones like music or a harmony, and little energy wave threads that trail off and in to lots of different directions, like pre-echoes. Then there is the mirror-touch synesthesia; direct empathy transmission – this is difficult to bear at times.

All these examples, they vibrate. Sometimes even the stillest of objects appear to be slightly moving, or about ready to take off. In my visual perception, there are many additional layers. They are like alpha channels in Photoshop, this is the best analogy I can give. So, there are color layers, fog layers, halos, stylized representational overlays, sound layers, energy wave thread layers . . . sometimes it is barely perceivable, other times it is rather debilitating. There are triggers that I must be aware of because of sensory overload leading to meltdown. Everything seems terribly amplified. – M. Murphy – 2019

A Meditation on an Exhibition

Beyond Beautiful: One Thousand Love Letters, artwork by by Peter Bruun

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artwork by by Peter Bruun

by Marty Murphy © – Feb. 14, 2019

Many of my artist friends tell me: When engaged in the process of art making, before, during, and after, in addition to producing a piece of art, one outcome is catharsis. Art is expression, and expression is catharsis. The artist may have multiple reasons for producing a work; a commission, an exhibition, an assignment, or just for fun … those are just some of those reasons. But, I think no matter the reason, catharsis will always exist as a natural complement to art and creative expression. Art is healing.

I was fortunate to be part of a group invited to a personal showing of Beyond Beautiful: One Thousand Love Letters, by Peter Bruun, and Maryland Art Place. Before I attempt to describe anything – please go and see this exhibit! It really is beyond beautiful, on so many levels. Rarely, do we get to be a part of something that is deeply intimate, yet shared universally. We take that stuff for granted.

As the artist spoke, he described the many ways in which transformation occurred during his process, and the role he had to play as caretaker of other people’s confessions while managing his own. Meanwhile, my synesthesia response has visually manifested the form of the incidental doctor – I feel as though I am witnessing in a kind of doctor-patient privilege relationship. Now, I feel I am ethically and morally bound/obligated not to share the intimate details; you must experience this for yourself and decide.

Here is what I will share. Each work has a textual component, a letter, and a visual component, a drawing – and there are hundreds of them. They are all uniform shape and size, grouped by theme, with the inclusion of some stand-alone sections that serve as introduction and emphasis. This is helpful in and of itself for basic cognitive recognition and storage purposes, at least for me. There are four themes being presented at this space (MAP): “Forever Family,” “Cupid’s Arrow,” “Wild Horses,” and “Love Thy Self.” The other half of the show is being exhibited in another space. But it doesn’t mean you will leave this exhibition feeling unfulfilled. There is a kind of irony that in today’s world where people’s privacy is ever encroached upon for reasons other than positive, here, we are invited to examine snapshots of this privacy.

Once I acclimated to the space, my visual perception became layered so thickly with color, shape, sound, vibration, wave forms of moving energies and moving pictures; this, on top of all the works exhibited.

The drawings that accompanied each work’s textual component came to life for me; elegant and simple, capturing a moment that encapsulates the very spirit for which it was intended. The work was so alive, so many souls talking. The drawings are all in response to letters received by the artist. Letters intended for sympathy, empathy, condolences, support, and love, addressed to the artist after losing his daughter, and how things change, and how circumstance changes things.

The writings; the pieces that drew me in visually were the ones I read. The ones I read related so deeply to the point, I could not read anymore. I simply understood. I have experienced loss under circumstances that our world readily defines as sad, tragic, pitiful, preventable – drug overdose. But, people do make their own choices. And, we are left seeking some kind of understanding. In this context; the hardness of addiction – I can’t synthesize what it means for you. But, I can say this: One thing all humans share, and have a stake in, is love. Love helps fill up the holes left by loved ones, family, and friends who made a choice that ripples forever.

I am including the direct link to Peter Bruun’s exhibition website detailing everything about the work.

https://onethousandloveletters.com/

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