The Magical Mystery Stones

The Mystery Stone project will launch at the end of June.  Hundreds of little painted stones will be released into the world.

It’s time to write about the mystery stones.  It all began when I woke up one day and decided I needed to paint a thousand stones and get them out into the world.  This made sense to me, as the natural evolution of "Brilliant Stranger."  Brilliant Stranger is a name that came to me in a dream, was once a curious traveling character in my sketchbooks, then for seven years a busy retail shop, and now... a mystery.

I’ve been increasingly absorbed in this project, sharing my progress and ideas on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter.  (Well… I’m a pretty terrible Tweeter, but I do share photos of the stones there. )  All this social media is what you make it, right?  After all, a computer and its' many functions are meant to be a tool, but like any creation, it can control you, or be controlled by you.  I have often reflected on the question: what am I doing with the technology I have at my fingertips?  (And what is it doing to me?)

www.brilliantstranger.com

Two summers ago I had a dream.  In the dream I was led around a room by a man who placed his hand on my shoulder and calmly spoke to me.  This being led me through what would best be described as a computer lab, with many people working at their screens.  Suddenly the screens went blank.  Everyone reacted differently, some pounded on their keyboards, some shook the screens, some sat back and stared.  A few screens began to come back into focus, but not all.  My “guide” told me this: “Those who know why they are doing what they doing will control the technology.”  Then I woke up.  What I took from that dream was the realization that mastering the tools may be a doorway,  but mastering the art of self knowledge is the key.  

So now I am using new technology and a raw material as old as they come to create the Mystery Stone project.  My "why" is this: to share what to me is the most magical thing about being an artist - The MYSTERY.  In the process of making art, things "become" what to me feels like what they are meant to become.  We (artists) facilitate, we nuture, we work very hard and we may apply a great deal of effort.  The way I see it, we don't determine the outcome, but we can control the technology that leads to an art experience.   And then it goes out into the world, and like our children, has a life of it's own.  It flows through us and we flow through it, and everyone who engages with it has their own experience.  Those experiences are what I understand to be the path to self knowledge, an acceptance of what IS, rather than a need to keep or control what we WANT TO BE.  So this project is my way of sharing that experience with hundreds, perhaps thousands of strangers and friends,  friends and strangers.  We can all watch the Stones "become" as the project unfolds over time.

"We should never turn away from what nature has to show us. "  Jana Levin

Back to the Stones.  In a time when our tools change everyday, when there’s a new app, program, operating system and gadget born every hour I like thinking about the tools of antiquity.  How stable and seemingly unchanging, a tool pounded from hard stone.  A tool for communication, a slate tablet.  A Rune.  A Beti Stone.  All these ignite my imagination, especially because they do change.  Over time, in new and different settings, even a stone changes. There is nothing in life that doesn’t change.  Permanence does not exist.  So perhaps our fast changing world of phones and screens is no less “real” than a world of stone and steel? 

"There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom
 of each person who has known and loved it."  Albert Camus

Rather than debate WHAT IS REAL and WHICH IS BETTER, I feel better equipped and much happier to wonder, marvel and witness this changing world we live in.  So I chose something so seemingly concrete, old, and stable to be the primary subject of a project based on the concept of impermanence and change.  The main suggestion (I am not calling it a rule, because it is a choice) in the Mystery Stone Project is to release the stones back into the world.  Anyone who is given or discovers a stone is asked to return it back into the world, into the flow where it can be found again and again and again.  And we can all just see where it goes.  And what it does, sees, and tells us, through all of our actions, our eyes, and our words.

Please join us on Brilliant Stranger on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/brilliantstranger and/or Mystery Stones on Instagram http://instagram.com/mysterystones to take part in the project.  If you find a stone you are invited to share a photo, thoughts or feelings on Facebook, instagram or via email.  Instructions/Guidelines are posted on www.brilliantstranger.com

For Every Thing, There is a Season

 

Close up of Painted Door...as of yet this is untitled

Painted Door

It's been the spring of slow beginnings here in Door County Wisconsin.  It's April 27 and it's a chilly 37 degrees today.  None of the bulbs in our woods have bloomed yet; we have just lost the last snow from the melting banks along our driveway.  Nonetheless, setting up shop for the Gallery season is on the agenda this week, for an opening on Memorial Day weekend.  The days of getting lost in painting all afternoon and reading and writing in the evening, if not coming to an end, are going to be rarer than busy days of business ownership.

It has me reflecting on balance.  Many of us spend a great deal of our lives trying to understand our lives.  My painting is my meditation, my vigorous practice where I find meaning.  Listening to archived podcasts of On Being with Krista Tippet today I listened to an interview with Brian Greene, "Reimagining The Cosmos."  http://bit.ly/1bMQQzP  At one point in the interview Tippett asked Greene if he experienced the relativity of time or only understood it through mathematical equations.  I was surprised at the answer.  He wholeheartedly believes the proof in the math that time does not have the linear and regular structure we understand it to have in Western Thought, it is the same equations that bring us our technology, our cell phones and our podcasts!  And yet, in his daily life, he does not experience time to be fluid, changeable and relative.  If asked if the past is over and the future hasn't happened he has to be truthful, that is how he experiences it.

I can't wrap my head around the math, but I feel that I am able to experience the non-linear nature of time.  Within the time at the easel there is "lost" time, and during those intervals of being I experience things differently than I do when conscious of time.  I "know" things I would not otherwise know and I can experience life differently, with a spaciousness that otherwise doesn't exist.  Perhaps seasoned meditators feel this way.  When I get caught up in the linear aspects of life, paying the bills, keeping up my online shop, shipping orders, and setting up shop for customers, the structure kicks in out of necessity.

I enjoy having a Gallery to open, am looking forward to seeing my regular customers and meeting new people, and set up is a fun creative project.  Meanwhile my time at the easel is going to be a fraction of what it was this winter.  And moving back and forth between ways of being is not always easy.  So how to find the balance....?

Wishing Stones.

I have more questions about this than answers right now.  I would love to hear what other artists do.  For now I have embarked on smaller projects that focus my energies into a specific idea, something I can meditate on.  They may not take my thoughts to the depths of my larger paintings, but they take me out of the cycle of work, production, and earning that we all have to do to survive.  It'll be interesting to see how that changes my ideas and work.

The Stones are characters in a larger story that I can experience individually.

Perhaps the seasons demand different ways of being, and the progress made in the summer season make it possible to do the expansive work of the winter.  I am pondering these things this week.