Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Where Love is enough

The faint savage spectrum of air across the sky invading the edge of unintelligible resonation of frequency as I peered into space without regret and fathomed the further derived silence of wavelength function between the pulse pulsation pause punctuation peak point paladin pattern place placated while the sky drum emitted nothing

And in the sunlight of yesteryear we were dreaming clear blue atmospheric mythos like pilgrims on our way to Granada while the singers inhaled in unison and for an instant it all became unified concrete against the compounded texture of vibration

Or was it just how the oboist pursed his lips against the horn and dreamed of sounds yet unheard like this moment when the reed failed and panic emerged across the stage and I laughed so hard as the camera zoomed in and he remained unaware of the spotlight which is how reality leaves us so often


and in the midnight
and in the midnight
as if in the sky we are becoming again
unified against the skin of forming



Watercolor, pastel
18 x 24 inches | 45.7 x 61 cm | Cason 120 lb cold press
December 31, 2013

And the eagle is dreaming into the space between ochre and blue mud earth while the ruby-throated hummingbird dives beyond the limitations of atmospheric control or was it something you said right before I lost all connection with desire and expectation while units of splashed pigment exploded against the fabric of reality textual in spalted spray




Watercolor, pastel
18 x 24 inches | 45.7 x 61 cm | Cason 120 lb cold press
December 31, 2013

shaking off the wonderment of fusion between heaven and earth tribal and discrete immaculate as the parrot rises up airborne in midair Phoenix rainbow splash frozen in stillness as if the very air stopped to ask where the ladder of nobility was going at a horizontal slant and we looked up at the clear sky searching for the slightest hint of assurance that all is well while reality blended into a multi-hue of myriad radiance between the whiteness of untouched beyond where nothing is more real than all that had been assumed as real and the sky melted and undulated before the units of chromatic invasion while we gathered around the possibility that for an instant we had become less than the self-imposed captivity of association by guilt of the faint savage spectrum of air across the sky invading the edge in an extended loop of repetition over and over until it was enough for now again this time around love and light



Watercolor, pastel
18 x 24 inches | 45.7 x 61 cm | Cason 120 lb cold press
December 31, 2013


where love is enough
and love is enough
three times

Oliver Loveday © January 1, 2014 1:30am EST



“3 Sentries Later”
Pencil, conté crayon, charcoal, pastel, oil pastel, watercolor and ink
12 x 9 inches | 30.5 x 22.9 cm | 50 lb acid free Canson
December 31, 2013

http://www.lovedaystudio.com

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Street Legal

We were riding fast with all the windows open heading for that slice of horizon just between sky and mountain were freedom collides with inexcusable containment frozen in concrete limitations of social expression while the road disappears at the edge of vision and we are riding street legal with all the tricks as the asphalt singed the rubber and the radio crackled news of reasons to never turn back and you only have so many years to reach the space where the shackles of reality can’t touch you before it ends again and you have to start all over again and the gas gauge drops another notch while the horizon stays just beyond reach like a rainbow hiding a pot of gold and we sing all the songs we can remember the lyrics or make up our own and let the wind carry the damage of living too fast too free and somewhere in a dream of splash right before the street united the hard won experience of knowing better but never caring with a touch of bittersweet wisdom that you only go around once before you go around again and the wheels keep turning and the sky keeps yawning deep blue sparks of horizon into the ghetto mind of carnival sideshow sensory gratification while the Candy Man just smiles from his rocking chair by the door and the lucky get what they need and the sky dreams of black and white reality airplanes looking for love while the pencil marks render dark smudges of motion beneath a white stick of oil pastel and the ink marks the space between centrifugal motion of brush and surface splash again the paper as the pigment of watercolor sings of going up Third and cutting across Vine which can’t happen any longer or at least not in downtown Knoxville where they destroyed the waterfront where the black people used to set up for market and the Candy Man left for Venus on a freight train heading south and all the bored and frustrated housewives have hope that the Candy Man will come back and give them that treat of excitement again but the road keeps singing and the street songs keep flowing past the gutter and into nothing beyond the empty silence of what is and what will be isn’t how it was any more and the fingers smudge the greens and blues of freedom into a sky above purple mountains as the fuel gauge blinks an E


Oliver Loveday © November 14, 2013 5:20pm EST

“Street Legal”
Pencil, conté crayon, charcoal, pastel, oil pastel, watercolor and ink
12 x 9 inches | 30.5 x 22.9 cm | 50 lb acid free Canson paper
November 6, 2013

"Street Legal" video of the creation of the art work.

For more information about the work of Oliver Loveday, visit Loveday Studio.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Crazy at the edge

Crazy at the edge of nothing where the howling winds scream across a barren landscape of unforgiving mystery as shadows move about where there is no light to block knowing the demons all by first name and breaking waves of madness lights the spark of splash between patterns of insanity and the darkness while the suffering pain of painful keeping the focus on the doing and ignore the pain remembering hours of long distance running when I ignored the pain and keep moving keep creating keep doing the work while the pain fondles the energy of what I have left to offer and I remember how my father never accepted that I became an artist he didn’t even know what this is to create but sometimes he would look at something I had finished when he was visiting and tell me it was good as I wondered if he even looked at it or was just saying it to be polite which was different as he was seldom polite to me but that was part of getting past where I came from and becoming who I am while the demons encroach and the pain reminds me that I’m still human out here on the edge with the insanity of creativity as the winds howl and I can’t go back oh how this hurts but it has always hurt like hell in this reality but I keep slamming into the next motion of making marks in the work while the pressure in between each flash of inspiration reminds me that it wasn’t just my father that didn’t want me to be an artist but all those that strive to stop my voice from singing out here against the deafening wind and I am inspired to keep going just to push back against that resistance to the voice in the pain of knowing that the suffering isn’t there to stop me from creating but is there to remind me that what I am doing is real and this is it this is who I am this is how it feels when one steps out into the unknown and makes it real again once more in spite of the resistance and I succeed in spite of the negativity that lurches in my insanity until that moment when it is all too much and I will lay down in humble surrender to the mortality of impermanence with one last flash glint eye light reflection before sailing into the unknown unfettered by flesh and bones but until that moment let the haters eat this victory against their immobility of spirit once again in freedom I sing in freedom I renounce all tethers in freedom I reside again


Oliver Loveday © November 6, 2013 2:30am EST

Visit Loveday Studio for more writings and art work by Oliver Loveday.

“Orb Overlap”
Pencil, conté crayon, charcoal, pastel, oil pastel, watercolor and ink
12 x 9 inches | 30.5 x 22.9 cm | 50 lb acid free Canson
November 4, 2013

“Other Matters”
Pencil, charcoal, pastel, oil pastel, watercolor and ink
12 x 9 inches | 30.5 x 22.9 cm | 50 lb acid free Canson
November 5, 2013


Saturday, September 7, 2013

The Rotund Found Sound Mantra

You found me as the depletion vibration decays into wisps of reverberation and memory lulls in the finer things while pondering the nature of wind blowing through the pines or children singing in the park and really I came into the scope of found sound quite by accident in a rotund kind of way while staying for a few months in a small dwelling on the top of Copper Ridge in the northeast corner of Hawkins County in 1983 with the porch taken over on one end with my welded steel sculptures which would cause this sounding that would travel through the wood structure of the dwelling into the living space which was mostly open in the middle so the floor could act like a sound board and I would sit in sudden exile from family awaiting the divorce hearing with separation anxiety crawling through my skin like acid and I would hear these amazing sounds that would induce a tranquility that defied the time and place of my reality so I traced the sounds out to the porch and discovered that the wind was causing one sculpture to rock back and forth and tap another which would tap another like wind chimes so I held my ear against the wooden handrail around the porch and tapped and heard and thus began experimentation into a well established discipline of found sound and experimental music via the discovery that tapping a hollow log made an interesting sound which became the first drum among humans forward to Zen Buddhist music of Japan or the random noises of the Dadaist as a response to the inhumane nature of technology before during and after World War I so the message is to not think about it too much or better yet to not think about it at all and just experience it without the slightest thought and I recorded these sounds starting later that fall after the divorce by suspending a few smaller works of welded steel sculpture from the roof frame of a open shed and duct taped a microphone to the wood going to a mono-aural cassette tape recorder my mother had rescued from a trash container and that was how I started getting this sound reproduced that I heard in that house and the sounds would continue to induce a state of tranquility each time I listened to the tapes so I knew there was more than just noise going on so I worked to improve the process but it was always blind luck as I had no way of knowing what the sounds were until after I recorded them and played the tapes back so a lot of the process became intuitive by nature and I would make tapes and send them off to friends who were under-whelmed with the sounds and idea behind them which probably had as much to do with the poetry spoken-text ranting and chanting in the background as I tapped away at my sculptures but I didn’t mind because I knew I was onto something and the tape recorder wore out or really I don’t remember what happened but I knew I could come up with better equipment and really make this happen so I approached a friend who was the director of a dance company about doing a recording of this manner which could be used as the sound for a dance piece and she loved the idea and just happened to be dating this guy who owned a small recording studio with an 8-track recorder so I went in and set up my frame with my sculptures and tapped out two tracks then added some piano and chant before doing the spoken text for the last two tracks and it was all done spontaneously as I couldn’t come up with anything to write before hand so I just went in and winged it and the finished piece came out as “Spiritual Warrior” which was featured in the New Year’s Eve celebration put on by the Knoxville Arts Council on December 31 1987 so I got interviewed by the local paper and television and had my 15 minutes of fame before receding back into the woods and making a few dozen copies of “Spiritual Warrior” and sending them out to all the public radio stations that I had an address for so the tapes got radio air play for a year or so before they wore out but no further fame or claim or funds came from all of this so it all went dormant for many years until I started trying to get the same sound through a miniDV camcorder with a portable mixer and lapel condenser microphones but something wasn’t working and the best I could get was the ambient sounds coming into the camera microphones which left out something altogether and I still know there is a way to get this sound again but another divorce and more financial hardship and a few years ago a friend gave me a digital video recorder that is really a great audio recorder as long as you don’t mind the two stereo microphones being less than an inch apart but the sound blows through and over to the computer and a bit of digital editing and new things happen along with some of the sounds digitized from those old cassette tapes and even if the dream hasn’t come full circle and manifested with this idea of being able to create that sound again I keep working with what I have and add more to it like mixing fractal music together with found sounds and intentional sounds coming from a musical instrument which is a harmonica this time and suddenly this idea comes to me one day while doing a load of laundry that was sloshing about in the washing machine that a neighbor had given me in May 2013 before she moved to hospice (and later died of cancer in July 2013) to turn on a track of fractal music that I had done a few months earlier with which ever program I used at the time and I had just recently discovered that this freeware program that I had downloaded a few years ago because it would play FLAC files that I was downloading off of newsgroups from the Internet would also convert midi files to wave files if I had a set of sound fonts so I had done a search and found a free set of sound fonts so the midi is now a wave and sounding like mechanical versions of real live instruments so I fired up the computer with this fractal file set up the Q3 digital recorder and grabbed a harmonica and jammed with the washing machine and computer and loved doing it so much I did the rinse cycle also and a few weeks later like you know I forgot to do this the next time I did a load of clothes but got it the next time after that and I’m just letting it all hang out there and have a good long piece playing on the computer so I’m blowing two harmonicas in the key of C and D so I can get all kinds of chords going and mix it up with the fractal while the very quiet Maytag Heavy Duty set on regular cycle (no one has asked me yet what brand of washing machine I used for these recordings but I’ll tell you anyway because this machine is way too quiet for sound art recordings so check before you buy and get one that makes more noise like the one we used to have back when I was married and living in a house trailer because the wife could sent the kids to the living room to watch Saturday morning television and that washing machine would make so much noise that they couldn’t tell what was going on in the back bedroom but never mind….) and I walked outside at one point so when I broke that 14 minute file up into three tracks the second one has the sound of the door slamming when I went outside and played the harmonicas through the window for a minute before coming back in and going into the kitchen so the sound had to bounce through this apartment before I came back into the living space and started kicking a 5 gallon plastic bucket to make it spin on the floor which sounded great until it spun and rolled over into the box that had been the shipping carton for Styrofoam cups that I rescued from a trash spot on a sidewalk recently which had a wine bottle shipping box on the top of it with the cardboard spacers still in it and a sheet of cardboard from a cereal box on that which the digital recorder was sitting on so this created something of a sound chamber that gave some reverberation and the bucket hit the box and the recorder fell over and I kicked the bucket one more time before blowing low on the harmonica for a minute as the washing machine chugged along and started to drain so I set the digital recorder on it for the last minute or so which became the fifth track in The Wash Machine Tapes there about the time I kicked the bucket and then I did another edit on the full track of the day starting out with some fractal music at the front for about 25 seconds after punching the gain up on the 14 minute audio track and doing a little echo so it sounded different than the more raw first offerings and then mixed in several audio clips culled from previous projects like a mix of chanting that was the first effort to get the sound I wanted for “Voices (a desert song)” and a couple of clips from field recordings of the foot bridge over Turkey Creek in Wildwood City Park in Morristown Tennessee and the retired water turbine from Douglas Dam that Maggie and I did during a stop-over to shoot some photographs of the blue herons in the river that day and then I threw in the 8 minute sound track or one of the several edits that I have on file from that project of the video “Energy Cantata” which ends with some spoken text from the poem “Homage to Artaud” which I also did as part of the spoken text for “Spiritual Warrior” so it seems fitting that it shows up in “Wash Day (remix)” as it is the theme for all of this as this whole process of finding sounds that induce that state of tranquility has kept me alive and of course you know the last two lines of the poem are a statement that I won’t commit suicide as I endure the pain and suffering that torment me through this reality of being an artist much like Artaud had to endure but the bastards gave him shock treatments and left him in the care of Catholic nuns during the war against humanity that time that war and now we wash it all away once again to the sound of a washing machine given to me by someone who died sober except they had to medicate her towards the end to keep her from screaming but that doesn’t count and we survive like my neighbor survived because after all she did a lot of damage with drugs and alcohol in her life because she was a professional gospel singer that toured the country during her early adulthood and they did what they had to do to endure just like a rock star does it and now her washing machine is the backbeat mantra that we survive to so here’s the poem and now you know this is about saving my life and surviving your mileage may vary love

Homage to Artaud

I would not mess with your horizon.
I would not eat your only landscape.

The birds are listing in a vision.
The whales are moving through a gulf.

Dogs are penned up in my memory.
Flames are marring my frantic signal.

I would not crack beneath your awe.
I would not explode beneath your awning.

Oliver Loveday © 11/04/81

The Wash Machine Tapes via bandcamp.com

Maggie next to the retired water turbin

One of the foot bridges over Turkey Creek

It's a Maytag Heavy Duty washing machine.

Saturday, May 25, 2013

A Question of Identity

The most important rite of passage in tribal culture and spirituality has always been the quest for identity. A person’s identity is their gateway into reality. A person’s identity is also a gateway into their spirit, so it is equally important to know who “I Am” while at the same time protecting that identity from others that would seek to do harm or take advantage of the person. There are many ways and methods for becoming aware of one’s identity but the most common method for males has always been solitude in nature. Buddhism was born after an individual in India spent time meditating while sitting alone at the base of a tree. Jesus of Nazareth spent forty days and nights in the wilderness, fasting and praying alone. The vision that resulted in Protestant Christianity came to Martin Luther while he was meditating in personal chambers. (Okay, I always love to mix it up a little with that pivotal point in Western Culture, which is historically accurate and a prime example of the spiritual importance of scatology.) While there are similarities between men and women in the experience of becoming aware of one’s identity, there are some gendered-based differences, the primary one being that a woman doesn’t appear to have to isolate the same way a man will because of the difference in gender-based ego function. A woman’s sense of self is stronger and thus able to integrate social stimuli during the formation of identity. Should this not occur then the same methods are available to a woman that are utilized by a man.

In breaking down tribal culture and identity functions over recent human history (say, the past 2000 years) there has been a lot of attention given to discontinuing any tribal ritual that would help establish and utilize a spiritual identity. A soldier vows to protect his country and its citizens but not his sense of self. He becomes a nameless and faceless warrior in the battle to protect, defend, and further the advancement of the rulers and powers that be. Military training is designed to reduce him down to a primal killing machine. Any sense of spiritual identity or integrity would incorporate a basic respect for all life and this impairs his ability to respond to commands that are in conflict with his sense of identity. The rites of passage that encourage the awareness of identity are also designed to be ego-deflating, but in the opposite direction. While ego-deflation is designed to create a sense of helpless servitude to the powers-that-be for a soldier, the tribal warrior goes through ego-deflation at a social level whereby his awareness beyond other people is of equal importance to his identity. A spiritual warrior is subjected to challenges that generate a sense of inter-connectedness with all his relations. “All My Relations” includes any function of awareness. The stars become relations. The grass, insects, rain, wind, and beyond are all integrated into an interpersonal and transpersonal relationship. All of life is sacred. To break a People’s will to maintain personal identity the opposing force must discontinue the rituals.

The first course of action in doing this is to “convert” the spiritual leaders to whatever spiritual or religious practices the invading forces follow, which is generally a dehumanizing religion that has very little regard for life. When the goal in following a religion is to have a better life in the “here after” then there is little attention given to the quality of life in the “here now”. That has serious consequences on the moral judgments a person will make. A fear-based reality is easier to control than one based upon awareness of self and the infinite possibilities of the Universe. The need for control of the masses and thus the warriors of a People is paramount for a conquering hero. So converting the spiritual leaders to the invader’s religion is the first stage of controlling the people beyond military force. Should the spiritual leaders refuse to convert, they are executed in full view of the public. Eventually the survivors succumb. The longer range procedure is to take over the education of the youth. As generation after generation loses touch with their indigenous spirituality they lose all sense of self as individuals and as a culture and become servants to the political, religious, and economic forces that control them.

One’s identity is established in the caste system of the invading culture. The indigenous people are always at the bottom of the totem pole. Their identity is now based on their station in life with respect to their relations with the conquerors. The better they are at serving those in power the better they will be rewarded. They will never be as good as but they might appear to be almost as good as their conquerors. Identity is based upon securing approval and an overwhelming fear of disapproval. Each generation is subjected to the process of destroying one’s sense of self in favor of servitude to a social and religious ideal of imperfection and unachievable perfection. “To Thine Own Self Be True” means to be greedy and self-centered to a person has been disenfranchised from their indigenous spirituality. Their social interaction is reduced to that of keeping up with the Joneses and comparative assessments of success based upon material acquisitions.

When an individual steps out of the social norm and seeks to establish a spiritual identity that person will encounter rejection and social ridicule. Every effort will be made to break the person’s will. It takes a great resolve to remain steady on the course during this process. As difficult as it is for a person to engage in a vision quest or walk-about while a member of a supportive tribal community, that effort is far more difficult while the person is attempting to function in an acculturated society that has given in to the fear-based reality of a conquered people who have functioned on the premise that success is dependant upon imitating the conqueror. One distinguish that is important to make between those who follow the course of an acculturated society and an individual who has made the commitment to seek and arrive at a spiritual awareness of self and identity is that the person who is subservient to society will view reality through his/her ego and assume that everyone else sees and understands the world the way they do while the spiritual warrior does not impose personal perception upon others. That means that while the person embarks upon a spiritual journey outside the acculturated society he/she grew up in, everyone in that society will assume that after some effort that person will give up and succumb to societal pressure just like they did.

And then we all die and go to heaven. Your mileage may vary.

Oliver Loveday © May 26, 2013 2:30am EDT

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Dreaming Dandelion Drama: the formation of nothing


Eddies of echoes welling up inside the reverberation signal of secondary silence while the formula of dreaming passes the gulf of dormant cognition after the deluge washes the idea of nothing out past the waves of inherent possibilities while functionality is just a state of being and being leaves more to be desired than we were talking about the last time splash adventures reciprocated actual results and there is a method to this madness if you stand there in the rain long enough but even then it is always going to stop raining sometime and the totally optimist in this movie keeps saying that they can hold out and not get it whatever that it is before it stops raining and we all cheer the effort to avoid getting whatever it was that they didn’t get while standing out there in the rain one more time like getting wet is all that important and then the rain comes and washes it all clean again and these marks that mark where the idea of nothing went before nothing was revealed keep shining in the trademark sunlight last gleaming light beneath a sky of stellar memory illuminated in sequences of imposition of myth that has nothing to do with star so bright make my wish come true in the land of concrete situations as it all drones into a backwash of echo again and again and there are holes in my shoes and rocks in my socks with repetitive symbolism of empty pockets except for the greater gulf of openness where the holes reside and it all forms into what can’t be sought or spoken of but just experienced and even as it forms it disappears into the nothingness of self-fulfilling prophecy and it begins all over again and again as the rain comes and after it is all said and done not all that is gold glitters in the abstract notion that liberation of self from ego-oriented desires and expectations can be integrated into a thin bit of rice paper where the waves break across the universe of pilgrim technology and the gossip doesn’t mention how many were left standing out in the rain or which way the sandman went while I hit the paper too hard with the brush and rupture the skin of silence with an explosion of fractured memory left dreaming dandelion drama beyond nothingness

Oliver Loveday © April 23, 2013

 “Formation of Nothing”
Sumi ink and gold ink on rice paper
13 x 9.5 inches | 33 x 24 cm
April 15, 2013















For more information about this work visit the Sumi Ink page on the Loveday Studio web site.

Monday, April 8, 2013

Post-Industrial Cave Art


Layers of color and start out with white into white the color saturation making this start of a new work out on the bank beyond the retaining wall wind blowing light breeze paint fumes going east towards the other apartment but no one home so keep working to get the first layer down on the paper and as it dries out Maggie goes out I’m inside waiting for a minute for it to dry and then take the other stuff out to paint and I ask her if she wants to paint some and she nods so I get the crate and sit it next to the cardboard box folded up from the sidewalk alongside Henry Street sidewalk gleanings of needing a piece of cardboard to work on so I can use push pins to hold things in place if I want to work vertical but today the wind is blowing but first we put the mesh from a potato sack over the paper and she paints and move it and use the mesh from a Mandarin oranges sack a little pensive until move the mesh to see what is left painting in the blind here and the mesh works very fine very fine and the spaghetti noodles go on next and Maggie paints different uses different speed time place approach not the same as how I work and I watch and go get camera to photograph as she does a hand impression on her latex glove outline cave painting post-industrial cave art longest running style school of thought way of doing art in the history of mankind as Maggie taps into that energy of signals to infinity of “I am here” identity unit of reality presence function of persona and more as the photographs flow and the video captures the last few minutes of work and it is finished and done now on the wall arrival of cave art in this cave of later day saints riding out infinity with paper thin walls of cave art using cheap spray paint to make the marks without wooly mammoths or buffalo just potato sack mesh onion sack or is it oranges as the spaghetti noodles create worm holes in space quantum jump jump across the Universe into white as whiteness silver shimmer Jackson Pollock lightness of being within you without you nothingness evading time space continuum as this cave radiates I AM I AM I am here and more and more

Oliver Loveday © April 9, 2013 12:05am EDT




























Video of Post-Industrial Cave Art

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Energy Clouds: Work in progress


Energy Clouds | First Minute

Those storms would roll through in the summer and rock the house and jar the windows. The best ones were to the north at night where I could lie in bed and look out my window. Dad always said that it was “going up the river” when they did that. This meant that they were going up the Holston River which combined with the French Broad River near Knoxville to become the Tennessee River. As a child I didn’t know what he meant. As an old man I still don’t know what it means for a storm to go up the river. It just went that way. I would lie at night and watch the storms. It was my favorite part of summer. Those storms would fill the sky with brilliant lightning flashes and the thunder would shatter the stillness of the night. I knew dad had been struck by lightning when he was a young boy. Later we talked and he would have been around fourteen years old when it happened. He always made it sound like he was ten or eleven. I didn’t fear the lightning even though I knew it could kill a person. It didn’t kill him so it didn’t always kill someone. At fourteen I started having dreams where I would fly up into the clouds and there were old men in the clouds that would talk to me and tell me things. It was always kind of funny at first. Other times I would have dreams and just fly around in the clouds and watch the energy buzzing about. I didn’t think a lot about the dreams. They were just dreams to me as a teenage boy.

I went off to college and started out studying physics but it was too boring and I knew I would never stay interested in my studies or work later, so I changed to art. Something in me knew already that I could do the same thing with color as a numeric value that I could do with mathematics so I kept exploring the ideas I had about the Universe and what made the world work the way it did and how to show these ideas through art. I wasn’t doing science fiction art or fantasy art and I wasn’t interested in doing “space art” for NASA. I just wanted to create visual images of energy. After I graduated from college in 1976, I had a very unusual experience that sent my life off in a whole new direction. I came to understand that I had a vision. This was after doing a fast from solid food for two weeks. I didn’t know that one could have visions. I didn’t know what a vision was. I thought I would go insane if I didn’t make sense out of this experience. I read a book about Rolling Thunder, a Cherokee medicine man who lived in Nevada. I thought he might be able to help me understand this experience. I started making plans to travel out to see him in late summer of 1977. Before I made the trip I was struck by lightning that summer. Actually it struck a metal fence about twenty feet away that I was starting to cross and I got the juice.

During the summer of 1976 I had started a painting. It didn’t seem to coalesce in my mind what I was trying to do with this painting. Over the years I would pull it out and work on it some more. Finally in 2006 I realized it was what the thunder clouds looked like from the inside during the dreams I’ve been having since I was fourteen years old. I completed the painting after a few more sessions. I never did talk to Rolling Thunder about that vision. It worked out the way it was supposed to. I’ve had other opportunities to talk to him over the years before he crossed over in 1997 but the vision wasn’t something he needed to help me with.

In March of 2008 I went to live with my father for 15 months until his health declined to the point where he needed to go to a nursing home. He had fallen a few times during the last month of so and I had reinjured my back when I picked him up. The back injury caused me to have muscle spasms during my sleep which threw my neck out. I got a pinched nerve that became inflamed. I spent June, July, and August with ice on my neck, wrote a novel, and went off on a tangent from my usual body of work with fractals. I called it the Cityscapes series. It was like looking down on a city from an airplane and seeing all the interconnected energies. I was evicted by order of court to relocate at the end of August, 2009. I had planned to have prints made of the fractals and sell them at some point. While working on “Energy Clouds” I thought about one of the fractals from the City series and looked at it. I started looking at all the fractals from that series and realized that most of them would work in the video as still images. Then I generated a video based on “City #7”. Using this video modified my original storyboard, as I wasn’t planning to use any fractal video in “Energy Clouds”. I’m including a short clip of the work in progress that includes this fractal video. I’m also including several images from the City Series.

Looking back on all the experiences, ideas, working to understand what is going on with my life, I see that the Cityscape series was important at the time as a creative outlet. I didn’t have any way to create art. I had no place to work. I had no materials. I had a computer and a program that would create fractal art. Even during great pain I would create art in whatever manner I had available. “Energy Clouds” isn’t about the pain or dislocation I’ve experienced through dreams or when I was struck by lightning. “Energy Clouds” is becoming a work that includes that as part of the human experience, but more importantly it is about the need to persevere even during great pain or confusion. There are good energies coming through at the same time and as long as I can tune into those energies and work on that, the creative process continues. There are good things that come forward that are of benefit to all human beings. The series of art works that have been created as part of this video are filled with the energy and vibrancy that I’ve experienced during the dreams. This isn’t abstract art from my reality. This is landscape paintings from inside thunder clouds. This is realism as best as I can depicted it with all the technical skills available to me through art, computer-generated fractals, voice, and a desire to understand more about the Universe. These are my quantum physics formulas in color. Oscillations happen.

© Oliver Loveday







Sunday, January 20, 2013

Nothing in the Snow

The rush of air into the nostrils of winter clear in the mind of no attachments with the snow as it melts in the morning sun and this silence of muffled acoustics as the warmth spills into frozen gulf between now and mid-afternoon heat waves of doing what can be done now and that is the rub as time bleeds past the idea of making something happen sparks shooting across the Universe sparks shooting across the mental landscape sparks shooting from the brush in the snow before the rising sun right now and moving with no time to waste as time bleeds past the idea of snow melting before the rising sun and clean clear crisp this air as I move and make ink from the ink cake and stack the five gallon plastic buckets two abreast two high there and put the cardboard box on top of them and the air is still so I can move fast with no breeze to mess up this effort and the rice paper is right there but it is so light that the touch of the brush moves it and I’m holding the digital video recorder but I can’t see the monitor in the sunlight with degenerative vision of nearly six decades of hard viewing this world so I guess and point the camera with one hand while painting and splash and enough and take it over to the retaining wall and the bank beyond and try to paint on snow but it won’t take the ink so I splash and crisp clear clean air of nothing in snow that is gone the next day and the next day and the next clear crisp clean moment of knowing that it is all nothing this beauty and in beauty it is finished. A-ho!

White Earth Dreaming

Silence sinks in deeper than this knowing
Astral tendons secure the edges of nothing
All of reality ends at the passage of Empty Gate
There is no illusion after freedom from expectations
Eternity is meaningless in the No-Mind zone
We are all One now
We are now

Oliver Loveday © January 19, 2013 1pm EST



“Bliss Dance” (with 6 detail photographs)
Sumi ink and gold ink on rice paper
13 x 9.5 inches | 33 x 24 cm
January 20, 2013











“Nothing Unmarked” (with 6 detail photographs)
Sumi ink and gold ink on rice paper
13 x 9.5 inches | 33 x 24 cm
January 20, 2013










“Ventures in Nothing” (with 6 detail photographs)
Sumi ink and gold ink on rice paper
13 x 9.5 inches | 33 x 24 cm
January 20, 2013












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