2011

In the Painted Desert of Northern Arizona, Roden Crater is slated to open this year to the public. I came upon this vision of the artist James Turrell during the two years I spent at art school. More accurately, the most influential teacher I've ever had upon my methods as an artist or writer, Mr. Daniel Duford, shared this work with our Theory & Practice class one semester. Turrell began the construction of rooms and passageways within the crater in the 1970s with the goal in mind for human beings to be able to experience in a visceral way, various celestial phenomena. Of the many things Daniel exposed my intellect and imagination to, in my dreams and memories the Roden Crater remained a towering and nearly mystical presence. I recalled recently that it would be closed to the public and shown only to those invited privately, for example students, until a certain time in the near future when it was completed. Upon remembering the work and "researching" the whereabouts of this vast artistic feat of uniting sky and earth, a New York Times article on Turrell's work showed that this very year of another reel around our Sun will be the - well, I've said it above.

There aren't many artists who practice walking the borderline between science & art, and even fewer who rather than walk, dance with their whole being and blur this deceptive separation. The intensive work which this man has been engaged in will benefit his development firstly and all others secondarily; if the former is true though, the latter will be a wonder yet.

Other Paper Works

Two watercolors w/ink created in the year 2008

Jpegs salvaged from a 1999 Toshiba Tecra laptop

Paper Work

China marker and colored pencil
Experiment in a single frame narrative

Intuitive Drawing

"A possible map of human potentials"

Ink & colored pencil on paper

Inspired by meetings of the Institute for General Inquiry and John Anthony West's The Serpent in the Sky

From the Table of Gift

Gift the First: Cover for Phillip J. Janson's Expressions From My Soul: Self Improvement Thoughts in watercolors, ink and colored pencil

Gift the Second: "Sorrow's Eyelid/Joy's Rays" emanation/radiation piece in watercolors and pencil mounted on wood-carved frame

Untitled

Photoshop collage of found images
Welcome to interpretation

When He Came Through, We Gathered

Hand made collage

Newspaper clippings, plastic sheet, magic marker

digital dictaphone recordings

stimulating growth

universe as sense-ate being

no is the ion of disorder

no is the ion of denial

the inability to halt the attack of inquiry

- G.D. Burns, late double-aughts

Tee Shirt

Photoshop creation

Homage to a local artist

Juan Belmonte's Ghost

  

Found image collage

View large for audience faces 

Centuries of Myth

Isengard

Falling away from You

Your fiery hands shake at me with a thousand palms
The glimmering yellows dust off their red masks

I am falling away from you in a broad refusal
of everything you glow as a heart


We denied this light
With every deeper and darker turning, twisting.
Now shelves of books are the bricks of our religion
Horizontal stack of smack and tumbling sedatives

The scribblings of memory and dreams
from a world filled with your light
we peered into the concentrations
of your ever-present laughters
The buffalo's form an echo of Word


Autumn cries at the gate of Beulah
and this darkness is a bitter sleep

O Moon, be conception's movement of
the soft music in my hollow mind

For on that day of sun, we are born rising


- G. D. Burns

Currency of My Youth

Enlarge for details

Photoshop creation from scanned images

The single most influential video game upon my life has been a role-playing, Super Nintendo console release from the mid-1990s. Chrono Trigger's gameplay, throughout its epic themes, plot-developments and magnificent musical score, impressed upon my Being a certain conviction that the past, present and future are intermingling and reflecting upon one another. Many aspects of the game, such as the use of magic as based upon the elements, a planetary foe which is simultaneously aiding & abetting the evolution of consciousness, and the most aesthetically pleasing time machine since the DeLorean of Back to the Future, presented data to me that further crystallized my interests in art, biology, mythology, and all studies which have invariably aided my path toward understanding our planetary experience.

While I matured, video games had a publicly polarized opinion as destructive to young minds, helping along the institution of violence and isolation within society. As the accessibility of video games expanded just before my birth in 1985 from the arcade format to home consoles (worth corroborating to the emergence of the personal computer), the creativity of video gameplay design likewise increased with new varieties and directions. As all growth accompanies a rate of degradation - this is in reference to those games which displayed a lack of creativity or less virtuous themes (Mortal Kombat comes to mind, being very controversial for the gruesome "fatality" finishing moves) - the apprehension to approve of video games socially was often fueled by narrowing discussion of those which displayed violent acts toward human forms.

The 21st century affords us a variety of console, home computer, and handheld formats for video games with increasingly complex resolution, adaptability and gamer control. Although, at such high rates of technological advance, the very fabric of our interactions with video games are evermore challenged and stretched. Do we actually acquire a comprehension of the Reality which video games contain in their genesis, by our Senses or from the composite Mind of storytellers, composers, designers? - only the conscious laborer knows. The creations which continue to reflect back at me the more perennial issues that give certain video games value (likened even to some works of literature, art or music) contained something which much of today's developers sacrifice for general consumption of hardware - imaginative vision.

Chrono Trigger has survived the limited longevity of its original console format (SNES, 1995) and has continued with a force propelled by its fans and players with more than one re-release for the Sony Playstation in 1999 and another more recently for the handheld Nintendo DS in late 2008.

Ancient Tele Visions

Enlarge for details
Illustrations from a found King James Version Bible
(altered perceptions by Tele Gram)

Dream of Vices

Enlarge for detail
Interpretations welcome
Ink on sketchbook paper

The Infinite

(M.C. Escher's "Snakes" (c) 2009 The M.C. Escher Company - the Netherlands. All rights reserved. Used by permission. www.mcescher.com)

After three visits to the Portland Art Museum, I still yearn to return for another sight of M.C. Escher's graphic works exhibition. The above print featured on the show's pamphlet was Escher's last, "Snakes" printed in 1969, and it hangs on the final wall before a stairwell to PNCA at 100. If you plan to go more than once, try walking through the partitioned room backwards by using said stairwell. Escher had many principles of craft and the exploration of non-linearity was certainly one of them. Let us honor his perspective with a likened sojourn.

Upon one visit, an observer had a magnifying glass in hand to see the Dutch master's detailed wood engravings. Revealed is a creator of practiced patience, an artist of spacetime. The exhibition includes examples of printing plates, in-process proofs, and early work from his tutelage as a graphic arts student (those pieces usually tucked away in numerous Private Collections). Entering the favored entrance are Escher's prints for the Book of Genesis, images of The Word. Early landscapes and illustrations of reflection, metamorphoses and the regular division of the plane - the breadth of his craft is done justice throughout PAM's walls.

Beside the video game describing Escher's laws of illusion and a small table of Escher books (with the recommended, in the opinion of this being, Exploring the Infinite: Escher on Escher), a strange but intriguing object awaits the keen observer: a fractal cube. Inside the cube are lights of differing colors, mirrors, and two corners to place one eye, on either side. Like Indra's jeweled net (see the Flower Ornament Scripture in Mahayana Buddhism or His Holiness the Dalai Lama's book The Universe In A Single Atom) your eye is reflected in all other points at the edge of this infinite space, while all spheres within reflect all other spheres. The sobering experience has not left me since my visit - it gives one the perception of the infinite that Escher hoped to create from making known the relativity of all perspectives.

Portland Art Museum is closed Mondays, open at 10 Tuesday through Saturday, 12 on Sunday, and closes at 5 all days except Thursday and Friday - open until 8. Enjoy the work with an appreciation all your own.

I Got the Living Room Blues

Ink and watercolor on watercolor paper

Road

Ink drawing begun in 2007
Colored pencils added 2009

Fearful/Symmetry

Currently working on a watercolor inspired by the illuminated work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which caused a look into the thick tome of criticism (or encyclopedizing) of Blake's work by Northrop Frye. This scholar's book that has often remained neglected on this blogger's bookshelf, was ringing in my ears after I arose from bed around 4 in the dark morning.

While the new day's sun continued to paint the starry sky in with our own cosmic color blue, I began to recall the first time I read William Blake. A short boy of fifteen, living between Lake Ontario and Erie's shores on an old circular road. The day my senses were opened by the words and images he brought forth from his being was a truer baptism than my physical inundation at 8.

When you use some spacetime to find and read any of this prophet's works, for the first time or again, an elegant creation is set before you. This is because of the elegance by which its creator "in-visioned" the world. If half the history and matter of English classes were the study of seers like Blake or Tolkien (see Ran Prieur, http://ranprieur.com/essays/JRRT.html) an understanding of cyclical nature (both Great Nature and our inner nature) would shed the skin of our epistemological minds. And in the prophet's Word, "everything would appear to man as it is - infinite."

Drawing of Last Year's

poem/picture
(read lines by color, any order)