KEEPING THE SPIRIT ALIVE!!!
PAINTED CHAIRS & MORE TO SUPPORT OUR NEW WHALE FILM
Being here now on Spaceship Earth has been so full-on lately, and we’ve been ‘answering the call’ to do our absolute best as passengers and crew that we’ve gotten a little behind in a few areas, for example, sharing our photos and art-work. A while back I sent out a posting with pictures of our cetacean-related art, done in honour of our friends in the sea, the ‘ultimate indigenous people’ and a true ‘extra-terrestrial intelligence.’
http://tutunui-wananga.blogspot.co.nz/2012/03/friendship-for-no-advantage.html
We are currently embarking on our most advanced artistic and creative project ever, a ‘beyond film’ about who the cetaceans, the whales and dolphins, are as fellow beings, as well as about the real and serious threats to their health and well-being created by human activity. We consider this project to be of utmost urgency, in that not only is there no one out there who is both willing and able to take on such a task, but also because destructive human activity seems to be under-going a massive crescendo globally as ‘man, the wise’ targets life-on-Earth with his vast array of weapons.
The art you see here is available for anyone who may be interested. We’ve been doing painted rocks for many years. On Flinders Island last year Liesbet painted an awesome wooden bowl with companion ‘turtle rock’ and a recycled ‘pizza platter.’ We also began to paint on old-style wooden kitchen chairs. It’s a tremendous amount of work but they turn out wicked, and are fully usable for sitting, lion-taming or display!
Liesbet painted most of the first one, the ‘solar rainbow’ chair, while we were staying at Castle Hill a few weeks ago. I did the second one, the ‘aboriginal star flower’ chair at Bealey Valley, near Arthur’s Pass, in a hut that our good friend Barry Brailsford built in 1970. This is a style of painting I developed in the mid-1990’s which uses what may loosely be called a ‘process algorithm’ that allows me to achieve a mathematically balanced distribution of colour and form. It’s a form of ‘non-repeating organic tapestry.’ We use Liquitex acrylic paint for all of our art except for murals; the chairs have several coats of clear acrylic sealer for protection.
We’ve also started making high resolution photo-prints on canvas. We, especially me, are way behind on getting our recent photography up onto our picasaweb site, but in the near future we’ll get caught up. Any photo you see on our sites can be made into high-quality photo canvases or prints working from high-resolution digital photos.
https://picasaweb.google.com/therockist
https://picasaweb.google.com/103250190528562753850
https://picasaweb.google.com/ilnissky
If you might be interested in having any of our art for your home or collection, or to give as a gift to someone special, please get in touch. Everything you see here is available and ready for shipping to anywhere in the world.
Making films with no budget isn’t something most cinematographers would even remotely consider doing, but we’ve made four so far that a lot of our friends like and that professional film-makers we know are quite impressed with. Our new project about the whales and dolphins is a major ‘labour of love’ in many ways and will go to the next level several times over. I’ve been putting the word out there for months to try to find people who might have some excellent under-water footage of whales and dolphins they would let us use in our film. Hardly anyone has even responded, which I find to be disconcertingly dismal, as we are doing this for no commercial reason whatsoever at our own expense, including sending out dvd’s to everyone we know; I seriously doubt that any human cinematographer who has ever filmed a whale or dolphin asked them if they minded or offered to pay them a royalty or licensing fee.
As always, we want to express our deepest thanks to our network of friends around the world who we love and who make us possible. This network sometimes seems to be shrinking until we remember that, in reality, almost everyone is your friend…you just haven’t had a chance to meet them yet.
We also extend our love to the whales and dolphins, the highest beings on the planet, who practice ‘friendship for no advantage’ despite our ruthless brutality.
Let’s just hope that we all will be here long enough to get to know the immense breadth and diversity of our family of life on Mother Earth, human and non-human.
There’s no time like the present…RIGHT NOW…to act to create a world you love.
NOTE: Thanks to our friends Star and company in southern California, Liesbet and I have three pages in the upcoming release of Oracle, a fantastic meta-psychedelic art journal that was born in the late 60's. Check the progress out here and place your orders in advance:
JEFF PHILLIPS
NATIONAL PARK NEW ZEALAND
APRIL 2012
