Driftwood, Meadow Lane, South Hampton (pencil on paper, 2012)

This driftwood drawing is of a drifter from an ocean in South Hampton.  Its shape, the result of constant rolling in salty water, stripped to its bare essentials.  Its bark is richly textured.  A fine subject to draw.  Did it float for years in the water, then find its way to the edge?  Or is it a sign of last Fall's water levels from hurricane Irene that carved away half of the shore line in South Hampton, and carried off many little pieces of pine trees.  Maybe the future will see the development of a small camera to accompany such drifters on its meandering journeys, and to tell their stories.  In the daily company of jellyfish, crabs and various shelled creatures, this little drifter gets swept up in daily tides.  The sun dries it over and over again, like a well-worn ritual.  I found it laying in the sand, about 50 feet from the ocean's edge.  Its character is that of an old shoe, with its shape tightly defined, yet containing enough air to stay afloat.  

Are You a Drifter or a Shifter?

Are you a Drifter or a Shifter? Are you a passenger or contributor?  Are you caught in the seemingly endless tunnel of human experiences and their motion, or will you make a mark, a dent, some sign to show you have lived?  Somewhere, with something, you can define yourself with an activity to make a contribution to history.  Branch out, take steps to change the course of something, make a mark that’s your own.  You enjoy shopping, but hate long lines, so did the folks who started Fresh Direct, a home delivery food service, that’s mushroomed into a multi-million dollar company.  You love making art, but can’t figure out a way to make a living doing it, check out The Abundant Artist, who helps artist reclaim their dreams and make a living doing it.  Don’t let the general drift of human experiences fool you to think you are contributing to anything in a defining way.  And don’t remain disempowered to contribute to something because you are unaware that are caught in the drift.

Participation in the general movement of life makes you a passenger, not a contributor.  You can strive to be an excellent passenger, that’s for sure, and a noble goal itself.  But I‘m interested in rule-changing, rule-expanding actions that newly define a field, or its direction.  It’s fun to alter the course of something.  I had a chance to do this with Camp Huntington when I took over the Direction of the program, and helped improve its overall program design.  This improvement strengthened quality of service for camp participants, staff and clients, and resulted in the sale of the program to a large therapeutic treatment and education company, the Aspen Education Group and the CRC Health Group.  Remaining a little family-owned camp was an option, but I was interested in how to reshape the program while also expanding its services to a wider audience, which was the result. 

This next piece from my first pen series is based on “shifting” the context of existing content.  It’s about opposing forces and their elements.  The rightward facing elements stack together in the same general direction and contain various content, representing the normal flow of human actions.  The object’s points represent forward motion.  The single left-facing shape shows opposing motion that creates a new direction.  It sleekly laced itself beneath the other existing forms, and thus was able to distinguish itself, and open up new pathways of creative exploration.

Hard To Handle, Amorphism (The Grateful Dead & The Finger Lakes)

Hard to Handle, Amorphism of The Dead & the Finger Lakes. 2009. Daniel Falk. New York. Pen on paper.  A piece that amorphically mirrors the pattern of New York's Finger Lakes and the improvisational musical patterning of The Grateful Dead's 1971 Hollywood Palladium show, in which the version of their popular cover of Hard to Handle was played with dark, rich undertones that flowed into each song part with five distinct players (Micky Hart, an original drummer, left the band for a 5-year hiatus in February of 1971); finding the band expressing and interacting around a central song structure and extending their rhythmic and musical communication in harmonizing patterns that are temporary, generative and fluid.  Geographic patterns like the Finger Lakes show external markings, yet contain mostly unseen influences that "improvisationally" crafted an opening .  The Dead's performance combining wisdom, ease, and insight, is reductively considered from vast hidden sources as: Artful Structural Crafting, a creative expression model I've identified to label elements present in making art pieces memorable.  The Finger Lakes pattern are the white vertical sections towards the bottom of the piece.  Both, the Dead's lead singer Pig Pen and lead guitarist Jerry Garcia performance finds them synched together in a high degree (no pun intended!) producing a mythical tangle of cobalt mesomorphs stirring golden flour in a surging sticky grasp of velvet-fanged musical tides, believing in itself and journeying cellularly and focally to a faraway land with a long coat-tail on which to dance with them.  In similar creative spontaneity, the Finger Lakes appear like a lion claw's scratch mark, indelibly defining space and time.

Review the Finger Lakes pattern and compare to the intuitive example I've drawn, which was completed without prior referencing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_Lakes

Have a listen to the Grateful Dead's Hard to Handle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Na9a79rdjxs

Storytelling is important to me, and fun to engage in.

I love art-making, it's where my imagination can travel freely into curious new worlds.  Part of that form of expression is storytelling through various creations: images, characters, sounds, songs, sculpture and writing.  My last post was a story that playfully asked a question about the mind, and whether we can see it and touch it.  I enjoy pondering the meaning of things in my drawings, underlying and overt.  As I draw, my mind constantly churns: analyzing and turning the process I'm engaged in physically to make a piece of visual art into an exploration of that experience.  My mind becomes an ally, a partner, an echoing voice that accompanies my drawing process.  Often when I listen to music while drawing, I can reduce the volume and activity of thinking.  I also experiment with not listening to music to allow myself to focus on drawing and solving problems that arise in fulfilling the creative vision I'm pursuing in a certain piece.  This piece below (The Source of Thinking, 2008) is the next in my first series of pen drawings.  It reveals the combination of visual-motor actions combined with accompanied thoughts.  The pathways the piece contains represent both visual and intellectual patterns of thought and interwoven memories.  Simplicity and complexity coexist, teasing each other forward in a dance of curiosity, of magic and wonder. 

If you met your Mind, would you recognize it? (The Bingo-Zingo Theory)

'Meeting of the minds' is a phrase that intrigues me to think: is there a mind to meet?  Humans refer to mind as something intangible, a mysterious rider within us, but what if it is a liminal being?  Maybe I've seen it without realizing it?  Perhaps it became insulted that I haven't acknowledged it before, and didn't say, hey, what's up, finally, we're meeting, great!  "You want coffee, or some particular type of mind-juice?"  Does it want and can it get a drink sometime and have some laughs?  Should I be paying more attention to it as a separate entity?  Can it become upset with me?  Does it have friends it complains to about me?  Do they meet on a regular basis?  Is it a little avatar in my body somewhere, or some curious extraterrestrial appendage?  Is part of me, or it's own being?  Does my mind experience human emotions, lonely, happy, sad, angry?  Maybe when I experience certain emotions, I'm mirroring them from the ones my mind is having toward me?  Is mind a concept, a religion, a Hollywood scriptwriter's invention?  Can someone direct me to the mind center for some answers?

I keep imagining a squishy thing in the shape of a moist, rich cupcake (triple chocolate) in a red velvety, loungy bathrobe, laughing it's ass off at everything I'm doing.  What a lucky formless squish-ball!  And I'm its inseparable workhorse, its dog.  Ok, I admit it, I'm jealous of my mind's freedom of control.  It commands me in a series of rigidly dominant, and often non-linear string of endlessly intense jabber, and it mostly won't take no for an answer.  It's fooled, however, by distraction.  And in this I've been practicing to become a master.  But am I fooling myself, or my mind?  

I've tried everything from therapy to traveling around the world, dating, swimming for miles, only to find my mind a constant companion without ever meeting the dude.  Again, I'm not sure I'd recognize it.  What the little corpuscle do while I'm sleeping.  It could be refueling with some wretched crew in lascivious places, trying to steal my liver or mess with my Facebook timeline to make me an organ donor.  

Why such negative suspicion Sheldon? (Sheldon is my nick name since about 1989, the year the earth stood still for 43 seconds and my mind delivered to me this funny nick name; fyi: 43 seconds being the average time it takes to do many of life's essential things).  The time that humans are occupied with daily life functions (43 seconds), is when the mind worms its way to visit alternative existence planes to cozy up with other sub-terrestrial bio-squishy beings, and demand I stop everything to focus on yet a new tangent.  So what does this squish-ball/ray-of-light/bio-puzzle look like?  And what social network does it frequent?  Start-up entrepreneurs and venture capital firms want to know.  Are you friends with The Mind?  Yes, we're in constant contact!  Too constant! 

Do we sense the mind, feel it, hear it, smell it or just imagine it to exist?  Exist?  Who said it exists?  Well, ok, I guess I've inherited that belief.  And if it exists, what form and shape is it in?  Or do these forms and shapes change?  Whoa, chill out Sheldon, just be...remember your Buddhism; breathe and catch your breath (another phrase worth exploring at some future point!).  

So if thinking exists in, or as a part of the mind, and I can't locate my mind, does this mean that thinking doesn't exist?  Bingo!  And if thinking doesn't exist, then rationality and its objective elements of invented realities don't exist.  Second bingo.  So then only bingo exists?  Bingo.  Now we're getting somewhere.  Well, actually no, because somewhere doesn't exist either.  It went with everything, nothing and now and then. 

You have to retain something to acknowledge nothing.  But is Bingo something?  You can't take everything away.  Well I guess I can part with everything, since Bingo is so all-encompassing.  And it's a BIG relief to remove the stress of having to account for everything, to handle everything, and to call everything something.  Something is definitely gone too!  And good riddance.  I've hated something for years.  I've dreamed about getting rid of that too, but that's a hard one to get rid of.  I may try a surprise sleep-mission extraction tonight to get rid of that.

But what if I yearn for a little Zingo every now and then.  Zingo?  Yes, I've discovered that Zingo is the mind of Bingo.  But since everything doesn't exist and everything includes now and then, and they're both gone, then I'm really only left with a confirmed ability to use Bingo.  I may try to locate the existence of Zingo one day, but it won't be easy.  Bingo wil be hard to catch off-guard.  I could try to replace Bingo with a new acknowledgement term, but then if Bingo wouldn't exist, I'm not sure I'd recognize the new word to acknowledge that everything doesn't exist.  I'm keeping Bingo just in case.  

You see, Bingo is not only an acknowledgement of a moment in time, it establishes that time doesn't exist.  But you knew that already, right?  Time was invented by Hollywood writers to formulate scripts for human existence, and to fight off evil film critics before they ate up all the craft service.  Who do film critics think they are?  The mind of Hollywood?  Bingo. Now we're looping closer to a theory of Bingo-Zingo mind.  

Actors so far: You + Story people x Critical Self-Deprecating Awareness + Stuck in the past = Reality we call The Mind.  

Whew, got that into a semi-workable formula, and just in time too: everything was trying to return and bring something, now and then and possibly even mind itself back into the picture.  Damn that mind, it's everywhere and nowhere all at once!  So Sheldon is upset with the notion that a thing called mind is following him around in a shadowy, weird kind of stalker way!  Bingo. 

Mahtohk

Mahtohk. 2010. Daniel Falk. Pen and pencil on paper. A bird eyes a distant horizon within a landscape of joyful exploration.In Hebrew, Mahtohk means 'sweet', and certainly this bird is enjoying a sweet landscape to be joyful in.

Entity: Reaching for Peace

Entity: Reaching for Peace. 2012. Tel-Aviv. Daniel Falk. Pen and Colored Pencil on Paper. A dove in the center reaches toward the sky, perhaps towards the sun or heaven, as a sign of peace being possible for human beings to achieve. The horse-like figure appears to be flying, encouraging and supporting the climb to achieve peace in our time.  

My Artwork For Sale on Society6

Grateful Soul - Tribute to the life and music of Jerry Garcia

Grateful Soul. 2012. New York and Tel-Aviv. Pen and Pencil on Paper. Daniel Falk.

Surrounded by a swirl of life and musical memories is Jerry's sagely face.  A 'steal your face' image appears faintly in the lower right portion, inhaling and breathing the very fire that the Dead's music conjured up for Deadheads to dance to and spin new webs of magic.  A Tye-dyed foundation honors the community Jerry proudly lead for so many wonderful years, and all along, the music never stopped.  Thank you Jerry.

Daniel Falk - Art Show! Tel-Aviv, Israel

A man and his selves (Hollow Man). Series A-4.

A man and his selves (Hollow Man). 2008. New York. Pen on Paper. 18 x 13.2 cm Series A-4

Rooted to an invisible ceiling, a hollow man evolves as two separate selves.  His outer self manifests as a human interface that manages various things, like work, friends and romance; his inner self is where all the wild stuff happens, desires rise, intentions form, reactions occur.  He tries to remain hollow, ready to adapt and cope with new circumstances, but things keep growing on him, forcing him to constantly manage nature’s inertia in a biologically sticky world.  Luckily, Hollow Man can manifest helpful characters: a sexy blonde woman floats in his inner eye’s mind-space, balancing his moods; and a teenage antelope that forms his right ear guards both thoughts (inner) and actions (outer).  A fire-like substance appears in his throat that keeps biology at bay and channels his mind’s experiences and visions into a passion-rich life.