Roots Design: Art and Architecture for the People

So I've been going through a lot, the last 43 years or so, since my incarnation.  I move around a lot.  I feel many things.  I talk to the spirits and hear the songs of the world in the wind and water and human hum of freeway and grocery store & internet buzz. I was a poet when I was young, and when I was nineteen and a baby left my lifeline, words stopped doing justice to the heartbreak, and reaching forward into the dark bright infinity of the future with hands and crayons became the thing that made the most sense. I went and found my mom dead in her bed a fews years ago, and carried her spirit outside and released it to the sky.  She had told me that "we are forest Indians.  Before the Trail of Tears, we hunted game and sang songs to Creator in the forests of the Southern Mountains" of Turtle Island. I look white, blues eyes, blond hair, vaguely ethnic features, but, my mom?  You could see she was Indian- off-the-bat. White people in this country, we...

The Mediterranean latitudes around the globe have a specificity to them that creates a large part of my consciousness, and one of the dominant meta-view of the world.  From what I have experienced, Tropic and Nordic matrices are partaken-in by the Med, but are alien in the urbanity that distinguishes Madrid, LA, perhaps Tehran, ancient Tyre, Carthage, Rome... I think of the Chaldeans, the ancient of ancients...and Ashely's astrology YouTube wind-down videos...these gossomer bonds through time and space seem to grow strongest and more clear in a certain rhtyhm of solar exposure....the temperate climates of the northern hemisphere Brown, gold, ochre, olive, ultramarine... the colors shade to the desert, they do...as well as the blue mountains... The transition from the coast ranges to the dense forest of the Sierra Nevada foothills is a major shift in consciousness, but there is a continuity, a connection that I feel when I stand on the vista point and look West and can see the marin...

 I thrive on routine.  Well, rhythm, really (language matters).  I remember learning about psychedelics from Jay Stevens  Storming Heaven, learning about the principles of 'set & setting', and since then I've been building, over and over again, cocoons of creativity to trip out in.  I called them visions. Deja Vu. Now I call them seizures Language matters. Open tabs in my browser: Wikipedia pages on 'Ur' & 'US Rail Transportation', the 'San Francisco Chronicle' homepage, Yahoo search results page for 'seamstress near me', this post-edit tab....I cannot find my sketchbook/journal and it is the first day of daylight savings, and I have to finish the accounting for last year, and I want to paint after, and so instead of looking through two vehicles and an apartment and this big haunted old classroom, I decided to journal in front of the internet, because I don't want to be trapped by my temporal lobe epilepsy diagnosis, and I can...

2022 was my 2020.  2020 was kinda my 1999. Been so long since I wrote much.  Since I put together an artist statement.  Made myself a product and wrote some pitches.  Since I've shown any work outside of my little shop I've been occupying myself with in the wild little sand dune town of Los Osos.  Been just living.  Art living. Where to begin.... Ma died. No, too morbid. I fell in love. No, too personal. I like waking up early. No, too mundane.  The work is about trying to capture the texture and significance of what it feels like to be alive. No, too grandiose. What do I say about the evidence that I have continued to pay good money to spend good chunks of my life putting colors onto surfaces in an attempt to create meaning and value for myself, and some hypothetical audience which I then go on to try to hustle up the best I can through pestilence and fire and death?   Do you even follow me on Instagram? First off, love. No. First comes the ...

 I'm up early today and filled with that expansive gratitude feeling that comes from surviving food poising, settling your mother's estate, and, well, that's enough for me this morning...really, I was happy with my sub-conscious, god-self, what-have-you, for having such a lovely dream to wake up from, in which I was...oh, wait, but, first, more preamble.  About the creative process.  I think that's what my brand is.  My product, message, brand id, and so on and so forth....so, I am typing. I woke up in the coolest hours I'm going to get in middle of a two hundred + hour California heat wave from a dream where I was enjoying a convivial time at a busy old-timey cafe with my sister and her boyfriend (he and I were discussing antique handrail design and fabrication, between snippets of loving banter and jests between my seester and myself, while music and glasses tinkled and joyful voices full of laughter and mirth murmured in the background) and I was cool and not-nau...

September 28th, 2023 Colfax, California.  Colonial camp, railroad town.   I've spent most of my life and creative energies in searching for order, meaning, harmony in abstraction: considering the implications of biology and neurology in social construction and broader cultural currents, expressions and institutions.  Or, trying to understand the process by which history, personal or cultural, becomes drained of specificity, agglomerated, symbolized and thus transformed into myth.   In many ways, this drive towards abstraction has been a defense mechanism against the confusion, terrors and pains the my specific difficult experiences and the aspects of my personality/life/family circumstances have engendered in me.  Even as I write this, I am reluctant to give concrete examples. I tend to want to save them, be strategic, as I feel they can be quite shocking, or have other powerful effects....for example, to illicit jealousy.....pity....etc......how much ...