Tsundoku

The Japanese have a lot of intriguing expressions that don’t seem to have a translated equivalent in English – a favorite is shinrin-yoku “forest bathing”, meaning walking in the forest for relaxation and improved health, which sounds like some kind of ancient wisdom but is really a recently named and studied phenomenon. One which speaks to me as true, living as I do three houses away from the forest.

Another expression to reach my attention is tsundoku, which means the act of buying books to leave unread, piled up with other unread books. What, there’s actually a word to describe this behavior of mine? Continue reading

Nulle Dies Sine Linea

Photobook 2015-1Snug inside The Bunkie Studio this past long and very rainy winter, once again I pulled together all prior year’s art making, took pictures and made them into another photo book (as I did last year), prior to putting it all away in storage to make room for whatever is going to happen this year. It was fun to look at it all again and remember what I was learning and why I was doing it as well as looking at the previous year’s book where it all began. Whatever it was that first inspired me to pick up a paintbrush, I haven’t put it down in over 2 years now, so it’s a pretty powerful force of inspiration you might say.

2015 Paintings
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A Million Elephants

Elephants-13Today, across the planet from where I am, in Kenya, a giant bonfire is underway. Twelve funeral pyres were set alight, 11 piled with 105 tons of elephant tusks and another with 1.35 tons of rhino horns, all intercepted from illegal poaching of 8000 elephants and more than 300 rhinos.

Trade in ivory from African elephants has been illegal since 1989 but that hasn’t stopped it and in recent years there has been an alarming increase in poaching. In 1979 there were an estimated 1.3 million African elephants, today that number is around 400,000. Continue reading