Garbage

For a few months now I've been in a slump... Sketches that lead to
nothing, lots and lots of nothing. Lots and lots... Of nothing.
So... Maybe just need to let go of realism. To let go of trying to
make everything into something final and just let it be. Maybe this
is the pencil sketching era... Oil painting is so involved - the
oil, turpentine, cleaning -not to mention the cost. I started a
landscape last week, gorgeous rolling hills of yellow flowers in
some picturesque village... And it was so utterly uninspired that I
painted it out and threw a garbage truck onto it, literally...
Painted a garbage truck over the whole darn thing....Ick.. Such a
total waste. At least with sketches you don't have to feel so bad
about trashing it. Also thinking about putting a knife to work
that's been sitting around collecting dust. Clears the mind I think.

Voynich

Detail from a page of the Voynich MS

I have been studying the Voynich manuscript for some months now. There is a theory out there that perhaps this manuscript was the work of a mentally deranged individual. While the manuscript is in and of itself quite intriguing it is also interesting to find that so many people
would devote so much to scrutinizing it in the hopes of solving this most mysterious work. Human nature... We need to know the "why.". Why would someone expend so much creative energy to produce something so elusive and seemingly nonsensical? If indeed this were the product of an insane mind, then would not all of us possess such impulses but that we simply have control of our selves? Do we generally lock away such obsessive impulses so that we can exist in the normal world? What exactly drives creativity? Is it simply an unchecked passion artists allow to surface? Part of the manuscript's appeal is our inability to decipher it. I think it would lose much of its allure if suddenly we could read it. Such is the draw of art... The expression of the artist's psyche in material form to be endlessly interpreted, just slightly out of reach.

http://web.mac.com/elemcheung

Robert Louis Stevenson

Hau Tree Lanai
I am re-reading Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. It has always been one of my favorite books... I think I first read it when I was 13 years old during summer break. Back then it was just a swashbuckling, fast read. But what struck me even back then were his descriptions of the land, of the fog, of the sand on the beach, and all that detail about the schooner. Of course, I had no inkling of anything of that sort... I lived in a little suburb in Los Angeles. And even though the ocean was but 20 miles away, it may as well have been 200 miles away. A landlubber to this day... ironic when I think of it, now that I live in Hawaii... and just today sat within a stone's throw from where Stevenson sat under the hau tree, listening to the sound of the ocean beating upon the sand. Maybe it was in such a place where stories wedge themselves in a writer's head to be born later. The vivid descriptions of the landing, the sea, the biscuits could only have come from having lived it. Is that not art? To take something real, perhaps even mundane, and to transform it into something eternal? One could argue that the ocean, the beaches, the sand... all those things inspire... yes, but only one of great imagination could take something we take for granted everyday and find something unique about it. The hau tree where he used to sit is now a place for enjoying a leisurely breakfast... go see it... Hau Tree Lanai off of Waikiki.