back soon

Coincidences (!), that, of course don't exist, and soon to end deadlines didn't let me to come here during last period.  I am up to cover the void soon. :) 

more memories

Below I have two more I found from 2005.  Just small sketches, more about remembering.  I love chess and candles.  I enjoy a good game of chess, when I have the chance to play and I almost always have some candle light when I am at home.  More memories...  I hope you like them.

old memories

Many many years ago I was living in a small greek town called Edessa.  I was for years member of the local Artists' Union and for some time its secretary before life takes me from there on new adventures.
Today, searching among sketching blocks, I found some sketches from that period and I got touched by old memories.
The one below pictures a small street through a beautiful area of old houses in Edessa called Varosi.  It's a preservable area of the town from the time that Turks had occupied the place.  As far as I know, it remained the same and I hope it will always be this beautiful, saved by today's modernness.  I draw it at 1990 and the block is yellowish now after so many years.  I tried to fix this but I don't know if I managed it.  Below I have both versions.

politicians in Greece bring people together

I suppose all planet knows what's happening in my wonderful yet comfused country right now.  Although to really know the games that they play under the table you have to be a political analyst, a financial expert or at least a very well informed, who does nothing else in life, possessed person with the agony of  tomorrow - and yet miss some elements for sure.  Right now I know many of these possessed people, who don't have anything else to do anyway since they recently lost their job and try to survive, and it's a madness spread like virus in a country that doesn't trust its politicians any more as, maybe, everybody should anyway.

It's not that I don't like politicians at all.  I suppose they have some kind of excuse to exist and maybe some of them started with good intentions.  How things change on the go is a mystery.  How they lose the fire and how they get fixed into their chairs of power and suddenly all of them become one with the wall, one with the system, is something that no science managed to figure out yet.  Not that these things happen only here.  And not that real power has anything to do with politics or titles.  But this is an other subject.

There is an impression to the rest of the world that greek people are lazy and we live by our wits or sponge on others for an easy life.  I don't want to excuse anybody but I am greek and I live here and I usually sleep five hours and work the rest of the twenty-four hours.  So at least you can be sure, there is an exception.  And I know many other exceptions too.  In fact, I know very few people who may have an easier life and many that their life is much harder than mine.  Especially now. 

Recently I was talking with a friend about our financial state.  We were trying to understand how we will manage to pay what we should for rent, bills, food, children, the very basic stuff, with the salary we earn from our work.  Because in this problem, mathematics can't help.  Maybe my beloved quantum physics, the law of attraction or some other universal power can make the numbers look more attractive.  

My friend told me "At least you got married" - I got recently remarried - "and you have two salaries at home."  And after some buzzing and bubbling on the subject we started to think of it more seriously.  When a salary can't cover the expenses, then two can.  When people feel weak because of the circumstances, then they join together.  Families may start coming together as used to do many years ago and live at the same house to share the rent or even go to the countryside, many small villages forgotten by humans can thrive again, who knows.
Let's say, there is a woman and a man who could manage some year ago but now they can't.  Even if they are not perfect match, they can share the rent, the bills and the food and survive.  And, who knows, they may find some interest to each other in time, or not - but the rent would be paid anyway.
From now on, I think many things will change.  And one of them would be the proposal.  The question that men will pop will not be "Honey, will you marry me?", it would rather be "Will we join salaries?"  And why somehow I have a feeling that this may work?  Maybe because now enlightenment hit me and I see the great plan, the wisdom behind our innocent politicians and the political scene: they want to bring people together, at the far end of the tunnel there is light, they want us to be happy!  Whether we like it or not.  I hope the bump will leave soon.  And I also hope that George Orwell will not effect me more and lose the counting of my fingers.

wild yellows

For Fall's Challenge of DPW, I wanted to paint something that would be both wild and brown.  Mostly because brown is one of the colors that go with fall in my mind.  I found these flowers in a friends garden and they were both beautiful and thinking of their farewell excuse for this lifetime.  I think I made a good choice, don't you?
(please have in mind that this particular photo doesn't justify the painting)

oil on canvas
15 cm x 15 cm (6" x 6")

the why I don't fly question

I heard that too. Gravity doesn't exist. Erik Verlinde, not any just scientist but a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the university of Amsterdam, says that gravity is an illusion, doesn't really exist, and the effects we usually notice during our everyday life are created as side effects somehow from the complex interaction of simpler things and powers.
Yes, it's surely complicated. This statement has put the scientific world into opposite camps. Scientists are arguing agreeing and disagreeing with the idea. Others are still skeptical wondering if Mercury is retrograde or what. And, as time passes from that cold December day of 2009 that Erik put the bomb, more and more scientists think again and discover that not only gravity doesn't exist but in fact it was something we already knew, of course.
And, then, why I don't fly? I may do so in some of my dreams but that's an other fairytale. If gravity doesn't exist, why I don't fly like superman? Why gravity works for me and not for superman? I want my own anti-gravity license and I want it now. Emmm, sorry, back to our gravity something where I hope to find the answer.
It seems that there is an anti-gravity fire lit that has to do with a specific fact. That in quantum theory there was always an uneasiness with this physical law. Most other laws go with the flow of the new physics but gravity? No. It's too old-fashioned to behave properly. So, it is a thorn in the eye of scientists who lay the perfect quantum table. Like nobody told them there is no such thing as perfection, at least in this world.
Trying to understand the whole story and its quantum branches, I realized that either I had to accept the unknown or I would have one of the greatest headaches in history. I chose the first since headaches are not one of the things I personally enjoy. So, gravity may or may not exist, we may exist in a level of cosmos where it is a possibility or a holographic kind of reality where it doesn't really have any meaning if it exists or not or it just has to change its name to something else like John. Till the next apple falls down or we start floating in the air.

music suggestion

I don't speak german and I don't really find the specific language very attractive when hearing but in every thing there is an exception. And the german language becomes very attractive when you listen to it from the right mouths.
One of my favourite songs I have ever heard is Isis of Faun band. It's a german pagan band that I suppose serves the norse tradition with their wonderful music. I don't know why or even what the lyrics say but listening to this song, as happens with most of their songs too, puts you in an other world, a magickal and seemingly distant world of miracles.
The existance of such bands also indicates that there are people who can still dream the good kind of dreams and this brings hope to my heart. Not the dreams that bed down our consciousness but the ones that wake up the power of visualization and open doors to inner places.
Have a good awakening. :)

a disaster example

I became really angry when I heard about the BP oil accident at the gulf of Mexico last year.  And I am afraid it didn't get better with time.  We have the "ability" to create so much destruction on the planet that we never get bored. The one disaster follows an other in the everlasting human made dance of horror.
Being so angry all the time for so long is not good for health or even our sanity. But, on the other hand, the apathy we can slip in as a reaction is even worst. How can someone react to this madness? I have a friend who boycotts BP by not buying his oil from them since then. Although I agree with him, I don't know if this is a solution. It's like BP is the bad guy and all the other super oil companies of the planet are ok, so we can buy from them. Because they didn't have an accident so far or because we forgot their accidents or because they cover their accidents better or something similar. And what is the solution? To boycott all oil companies?
What a great idea. We can boycott all oil companies and turn to more eco-friendly energy sources. But, in this case, who will protect all these innocent inventeurs who invent water-moving vehicles and stuff like this and have a tendency to disappear in thin air some dark night? And who will protect their protectors too?
It's like a cloud that covers any real revolutionary act to keep save the ruling status. A mist that disappears people and funds, so we will be always under the "protective" umbrella of big companies like BP and any other BP.
I don't want to think that we won't find a way to skip this vicious circle of power and weakness. Mainly when we deeply know for sure that it is a fake weakness because of laziness, stagnation and leisure. Because we are used in this situation and we became ourselves' worst enemies. Maybe this is the worst disaster of all.

something wicked swam the oceans

It's something we could find in a fairytale, a monster that nobody could defeat. And in its time nobody could defeat it really. And it's new to us although so old that in its time humans were a sperm in the mind of the divinity that would find a fertile womb millions of years later.
It was a big whale. You can easily say, haha, even now there are big whales, even huge ones, the kind of whales that photographers swim around and they look like flies.
It was a big whale about 17 meters long. Em, you could also say, there are much bigger whales right now traveling the oceans like in their private pool.
Ha, it was a big whale about 17 meters that had long teeth 36 cm long with 12 cm diameter each (at least double the size of any other whale's teeth) in both in its upper and lower jaws that could bit and chewed its victims. Well, that's a new one.
This creature, named Leviathan, who we all know was, or still is, the name of one of the seven princes of hell, was found recently as a whole for the first time after 12 to 13 million years at the coast of Peru and it used to be one of the biggest predators of the planet. Do you want to see it? Check this.
Maybe the extinction of Leviathan and dinosaurs was one of the reasons that let the humans space to exist. Otherwise, what hope would we have? Although there are still the ones that say that dinosaurs never really wiped off the map but they just went down in the ground or they changed to fit into humans world. And, who knows, they maybe plot right now ways to conquer humanity and take over the planet, as all decent "bad guys" do.

great vegan books

Do you want to dive into the science of feeding? And I am not talking about advanced feeding like completely raw or fruit diet or, much more, sun light or chi diet. The more common vegan nutricion that anyone can try and succeed without too much effort.
It will need its time, nature is never in a hurry, but it worths the time and the effort for someone who has understood the values and the need for such a diet. In this particular case, as in almost everything, we need to become conscious about it.
How to learn more about veganism and feed the mind before the body? There are a lot of books but only a few know the subject well and in depth. Doing my research at the beginning of my diet change I found a raw food guru who crashed all my health questioning that was based on the program that had been created in me from family, friends, the society and the collective subconscious after so many flesh eating millenniums. He is not the only one but he is of the kind that knows deeply and seriously his subject. Who is Gabriel Cousens? I won't bother you with his bio, since it is something that anyone can find doing some google search. I will challenge you to read his books and I will suggest two of them that I simply love: Conscious Eating and Spiritual Nutrition.
Don't feel frustrated by the number of their pages as I was when I first saw them. Soon you will want them to have more of them since each one is an informative diamond opening gates to the mind.
Read, understand, feel, make them your own and when your program starts to crackle experiment, taste, smile.
Believe me, it worths the try.