Tag: Tides

Hidden Worlds

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I live on the coast, or so it seems some of the time. We are actually on this huge estuary and the tide violently sweeps in and out over the mudflats. Islands appear, many becoming reachable on foot. A vast underwater landscape is revealed. Along the expansive coastline, dark bands of colour appear where the water relentlessly returns; this line appearing so awkward, seemingly mis-placed halfway up the rocky shores.

I’ve been thinking today about how so much of our world is underwater. This idea presents a parallel to our personalities, or our memory vs reality. So much is often hidden beneath the surface.

I drew this thinking of those curious worlds, sunken typically to make way for hydro-electric schemes. It has the same appeal of the desert village. Maybe even more appeal, as it is not easily visited. In this dark and murky world, your imagination can take hold and it can become something altogether fantastic and different. Or perhaps terrifying.

Evolution

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After yesterday’s entry I kept feeling hopeless about the dystopia I had travelled to in my mind…even if I did say, acquire all this knowledge to understand the world, I would somehow also have to take all the power to make the right changes. Wouldn’t educating myself otherwise just be to my benefit?

When I was a child I didn’t question adults. I just assumed they had all the answers and that those answers were it, end of story. Growing up, I realised that in almost every field we are just trying to develop upon what knowledge and experience we already have. We often cannot be sure, but we have to make a decision on the best information available. Sometimes the outcome isn’t good, which is why we are often so resistant to change tried and tested methods.

When we try something new, it should be small, incremental changes to test things out, without potential massive consequences. Maybe a lot of tests can be carried out simultaneously, revealing what can be further advanced. This idea led me to think about evolution, and how over time this is how we have acquired experience and knowledge. Through accidents, purposeful tests – in evolutionary terms, ‘mutations’ – we have the capacity to succeed or adapt to changing circumstances. The fact that mutations tend to reappear creates a resilient and diverse progression.

I drew this image thinking I’d try draw a diagram to explain evolution. It’s interesting because it’s a branching pattern endlessly repeated in nature – in trees, blood vessels, rivers and tidal estuaries. The different colours at the end of each branch signify a specific type of mutation.

Media Surges

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What I specifically want to talk about in this post, is modern society’s addiction to social media. It’s probably a bit rich coming from someone who is ‘putting it out there’ and indulging in psychological navel gazing, but ‘in real life’ I don’t consider myself married to my devices and I am doing this, for the time being, as a sort of mental therapy. This topic is a bit of dark theme.

Without sounding Orwellian, I think we have all become ‘plugged in’ to this media machine, bombarded with so much information and subliminal messaging, perish the idea that you may have any time or inclination for independent thought. Before you know it, you are opinionated about stuff you don’t understand, and ready to walk out of work or school to demand government action. Follow whoever is loudest. Ignore the small print that explains the real, much more complex issues (and might actually demand different action): it’s long since submerged into oblivion. Sure enough nearly everyone, probably me as well, is swept along this urgent, gushing surge resulting in damaging changes to policy, funding and general societal opinion. But is it uncontrollable? Is it really just the result of a few random ripples, or is someone busy cultivating the momentum? Whatever it is, your elected government is already drip feeding the next surge to your children at school via the national curriculum. We have to stop tolerating this.

The problem is, unless you can educate yourself in all matters, what sources can you trust? Doesn’t everyone have an agenda? Can anyone not be ‘bought’? Or, more sinisterly, ‘silenced’? It really brings home the importance of education and nurturing critical thinking.

I’m not proud of today’s sketch. It’s probably a reflection of my mood as well. The surge starts, powerful, momentous, dragging along everything beneath it. Momentum peaks mid-wave, but too late, a crest inevitably forms and suddenly you are over the crest, devoid of energy, left with the consequences.

Communication

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I’ve always loved the power of the art, to convey a feeling, a thought or idea, a truth. Language can bend messages and twist truths. But then so can images. Sometimes the best writers and poets succeed in building vibrant images with language, but a different version is always imagined depending on who is listening or reading. Visual and Audio art is also read in whatever way your brain is willing to digest it. Just like your brain draws an imaginary line around the atom, or between tides, we build our own systems to understand the world around us. These limit us, but we clearly cannot function without them.
Will my truth and your truth ever be completely the same? Can two people ever achieve a complete understanding of one another? Sometimes there are moments, maybe sparks, where this can happen, but I don’t think two beings could ever be in complete synthesis for a sustained period.

Relationships are like this. As you build them you gradually accumulate more of these sparks, and bonds are formed. Sometimes those initial sparks might be all you have, other times we build on them to form intense life-long friendships, or maybe one day we realise we only thought they were happening and the truth was completely different. It’s funny how fundamentally, I think everyone desires completeness with others. It’s a shame what rubbish communicators we are.

This post isn’t so much to do with tides, more reflections. One might be the truth; the other your perception of it; the other someone else’s. Of course there is no knowing which is which. Your truth is yours and no one else’s, and probably not the truth at all.

Invisible forces

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Going back to the discussion a few days ago about tidal forces… I imagine this as two men pulling apart; giving and taking. This one dimensional view is revealed to act in two, then three dimensions. You see the central nucleus is eventually stretched to mimic the appearance of an atom.
I vaguely remember high school chemistry: initially atoms were presented as little balls within little balls with a nucleus and a bunch of electron balls in a perfect orbit around them. Later on, as we progressed, this was explained as still a nucleus with stratified electron clouds. Then in Physics, this is blown apart and you realise everything is broken down a third time into minuscule particles, some that can combine or subtract to become a different particle, imposing its own massive forces on everything around it. Basically, everything is made of the same stuff and most of everything is actually nothing. I think I would actually lose my mind if I learned it goes further than this.
What I mean to come to here, is that we, man, are like these tiny minuscule forces, we and our own whims are so insignificant in the grand scheme, whatever that is.

Apart from these thoughts, I was lucky enough lately to have a really good stargazing experience. I had that evening watched my dog curl up into a ball on the cold beach and laughed at how he was following passive house principles by reducing his surface area. Surely an architect joke. Then I looked up and started to think…clearly the sphere is the most efficient shape in all existence. How weird that our own galaxy is more or less two dimensional.

I can’t call the doodle with this post ‘art’ but I was thinking all these thoughts as I drew it. Also I was on a train and my hand was not steady. Looking at it I realised my brain is drawing a line around the edges; clearly it can’t handle what it’s actually looking at and trying to rationalise it in some way; creating its own system to understand what it’s seeing. I hope you can find the hidden number.

just kidding.

Generations

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I woke up to this scene this morning, my little one had crawled into bed and was quietly breathing next their sleeping father. They looked like they were flowing together, snoozing away. It was a happy, peaceful scene.

As I watched them I thought of how we pass on some of ourselves, in various guises, onto our children. It lead me to think about how we grow, flower, bloom, fruit and then eventually wither like every other life form. This endless cycle is as sure as the tide: ebbing from the shore to the massive swell, eventually coming back to land, different.

We tend to focus on our own singular existence, but we are just a wave if the sea. What if we could reposition our perspective, our sense of self, to this larger, shifting, continuous and collective existence? How we might live differently?

Tidal growth

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At this time of year I’m busy foraging in the woods. The abundance of summer starts to turn over and all sorts of activity is going on. Small animals and birds are collecting provisions to see them through the coming winter, and, in the way that nothing is wasted by nature, old growth, fallen trees and rotting fruit is undergoing varied decaying processes as the weather cools.
Last year’s storms caused havoc here, and many of last years trails are still impassible with fallen trees. Today I rambled along a path and had to climb over, under and around all sorts, trailing through overgrown brambles. Looking up the hill, you could see the awesome level of devastation, trees keeled over in all directions, all stacked against and upon each other like a precarious pack of cards suspended mid-collapse.
Anyway, coming back to foraging: of course it’s a prize to find something, but it’s really made me focus on the environment around me – taking into consideration the weather, tree species (which I am still learning), seasons and ground cover, or the specific substrate where something is growing. You start to understand the certain conditions that nurture what you’re looking for.
So this is a sketch of some fungi – I think maybe ‘dyer’s mazegill’, a fungus that was used by painters to produce ochre hues. I’m not completely sure though, because this is growing like a polypore in a bracket-like formation.
I am still a foraging novice, but one of the most fascinating things about fungi is learning that each species flourishes in specific conditions, sprouting it’s fruiting bodies at the boundaries their domain. A lot of these tend to occur as natural tide marks along the edge of a group of a particular species of trees. You can imagine their vast hidden webs beneath the soil, an invisible power struggle going on beneath our feet.

Tidal forces

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Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how nature exists in balance because of the eternal fight between…everything that exists. This tidal fight, which maybe isn’t tidal at all, given it involves an infinitesimal number of multidimensional, time-transversing, elements, will never be static until there is nothingness. I’ve also been thinking about how people are like this. We all fight for our own agendas; everyone pushing away, maybe sometimes pulling together. Sometimes I do wonder what we could achieve if we all acted collectively, moving in a straight line. Maybe it’s our self determined role to keep stretching those boundaries in all directions…just a thought.

Today a really crude sketch of an idea I’d like to refine. This represents just two opposing forces as men. I need to get back into some life drawing to really draw out the tension in the bodies, and have a think about any symbolism I can introduce…what specific message I want to convey.

Tides

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The first theme we are exploring is…TIDES. Why tides…well, because it resonates with a lot of my thinking right now. Opposing forces, constant flux, cycles (life cycles, organic cycles, circular time). I expect to get lost into this theme for a good while.

This first image is a mess-about with Adobe Fresco. I am planning to do better than this, hopefully achieving a synthesis between hand drawn and computer augmented. It doesn’t matter too much now; this is more of a concept study. You’ll notice there is no line at the boundary, that was a conscious decision. The push/pull relationship between the opposing forces becomes more dynamic. I think the beautiful thing about tides is that no ‘line’ exists – that imaginary line is constantly shifting.