Art, like sex; which in reality is simply another expression of art, another transcendental vibration of the transient human spirit; but art itself, in its purest form, is the liberation of the unrepentant human truths we each hold inside ourselves.

When we consider the self, we often first think of our bodies, the things which we can discern as real rather than the things which require us to imagine something larger than the physical realm, something which escapes the body despite our best efforts to deny and defend against the undeniable and the indefensible; the universal truth of mortality.

Art, like death, is inevitable; a certainty by which we all will eventually participate – but in making art, it is the same unrepentant spirit within each of us, demanding in its will to be expressed, like something growing within us with exacerbating intensity which must escape this fragile shell our true selves inhabit – be it expressed on a canvas, in a piece of music, in the language we speak and hear, between two sentient beings sharing their bodies with each other, or a word or two… even if they’re scribbled on a scrap of paper; art always finds its voice.

My personal art, my voice, has always been best expressed in words, while my universal art, my spirit, the things based on gender and the biological basic instincts to touch and be touched, are expressed with my body. Each of these expressions of art is a reflection of my human truth, yet it is of words and personal art which I need to express myself now.

Buddhism teaches us that we cannot cling to the corporeal, that this world is simply a transient moment, an imprint of the universal mind where the space between instants is not measured in the tick-tock of this society we’ve constructed around us, but rather in the stillness of eternity – imagining the universal mind as each star in the sky being a single thought. Our minds as they are now, cannot truly conceptualize the largeness of eternity, of the vast distance between physical objects in the universe we can perceive with the senses we’ve been given, but we constantly try, for reasons even we cannot always understand, and it is this thing we call art. Our art, both the personal and the universal, are how we physically express the intangible instant of thought.

If we can stretch ourselves to comprehend a vision of infinity, it then becomes simple to understand our vision of art. We tend to think within this tick-tock society where we measure everything in distances in time – the distances between two distinct events. It has always been my belief that because we exist within a universe as vast as this, that it’s always important to try and slow things down long enough for us to catch a glimpse of what is often unseen right before our eyes.

Have you ever had a moment… a night making love perhaps? When time itself felt as tho it were standing still? When the moments in which your flesh was pressed against someone else’s flesh… when the moments became minutes… when the minutes became hours… and when you both lay quietly together in the afterglow and imagined a dawn which would never come, a night which would never end, and a place where the rules of time were bent and broken? Time is but a door which we rarely perceive but all must walk thru – and yet, I consider the space between my own expressions of art, my words, these tangible things by which I interpret my thought and share it with others.

Writing, like any other art, comes from the same universal well in which our thoughts inhabit, it is an organic living thing within me, but I’ve never been of the opinion that this is something which I can force or control – it must always come on its own terms, and in its own time. For myself, I find the spaces in between my need to express my art, to write, aren’t very predictable or even consistent, but I’m comfortable with that because that’s how I understand the nature of my ability to express these things.

I make love when I must, I sing when I must, and I write when I must. These are the drops of water I draw from the universal well and shed away in either my sweat, or with my tears.

When I first started sharing my writing in this digital realm I call cyberia, I didn’t know what to expect. I certainly didn’t expect that my art, my words, would touch someone else who happened to wander by and that I would inspire something within them, but that’s exactly what did happen. As I’ve written about in great detail here, I told the story of how I encountered a man ironically named Adam, an artist of a different expression but formed from the same elements as all of us, and how something which became known as The Illustrated Lazy Geisha was born into this world. This work took the form of a graphic novel which is an interpretation that captures a moment in time of my life, which represents both beginning and end to the ongoing story of my life. Like any interpretation, the artist draws from within themselves to express what they’ve been touched by.

A quote my husband loves and often repeats is from Pablo Picasso:

“Good artists copy, great artists steal…”

The thought behind Picasso’s words is that artists must steal inspiration from anything, anywhere, and anyone, and then make it their own. It is in this simple axiom where we begin to understand that art itself is larger than any one individual, as we are all interconnected on the universal scale, so are we intertwined together on the human scale.

As I began to understand the artists behind The Illustrated Lazy Geisha, I learned that this was not simply the expression of one man, but rather a collaboration among a group who each offered their own impression on this collective work – a work which has borne slow fruit, but with nectar as sweet as the first kiss.

Sometimes we express art as a linear timeline because it’s something we can all understand. This chapter comes before that chapter, you must see this picture to understand the next picture, and so on. These progressions become the stories by which we gain understanding of the artist’s intent, and we appreciate how the art unfolds before us. So again, this is true with The Illustrated Lazy Geisha.

If you’d like to see how this work has grown, you can check out this .pdf file here which chronicles the conception and brings you what’s become known as Chapter One, and if you’d like to see how this work has progressed – go to Flickr, sign in, and do a search for SHOAL. Then — select People, and then go to Heavenly Zhao. This photostream contains not only where The Illustrated Lazy Geisha is now, but it also has many wonderful individual works done by the lovely Adam. You can also visit the group responsible for all this on their blog Lone Sloan Delirius here.

I will be forever grateful and intensely humbled that my own art has inspired someone else’s. That is a gift for which there are feeble words of thanks to offer, tho I always try my best.

Other Bloggy Things

I’ve been somewhat quiet this past week. My professional obligations have left me with little time and even less headspace to be able to find a place from which to write, but things are starting to level off a bit. As always, I have many projects that I’m working on; reviews, essays, articles, and other things – but as always, my art comes on its own terms, as it must. I thank you for your patience with me, as always.

I did work on some of the core elements of geishaland over the weekend – the Links, Media, Reviews, and About pages have been updated, tho everything here is always in a state of flux. I still need to go thru the Blogroll and there’s always going to be something here that needs my attention, as if it were my child, as it is with all my art. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share this with you.

Aishiteru wa.

Image Courtesy: Lone Sloan Delirius | Artist: Adam Narcross