Topology of Hearts, Hands, and Minds (version 8)

I made several multilayered and diverse versions of this piece already, but I wanted to focus in on the original elements that are a part of the natural media of the drawing. There is indeed a cookie-cutter layer behind the shapes embodying the color, but I tried to make it as close as possible to the color of the paper that the original drawing was drawn on.

I didn’t use the original drawing after scanning it in because my goal was to finish connecting the interlinking conglomerations. In the original drawing, I only succeeded in getting two full representations of the pinwheel-like spiral shapes. This was just simply not enough to display a continuous representation of them. So I repeated them by copying the drawing and repeating it once over. I had to do some detail work so that the two pieces would dovetail together and look like one piece.

Creating this piece, both with traditional media and digital media, was an interesting attempt at a mathematical concept by using my approximation skills. In other words, the proportions and measurements weren’t done with rulers, compasses, and French curves. I wanted to challenge myself in making measurements by just eyeballing it. I knew that there would be mistakes and inconsistencies, and I welcomed these… except for when I spilt some coffee on the drawing earlier when I was working on it in a cafe. I knew I’d be able to edit this problem out though.

This brings me to another point to discuss in the making of art. When I was very young, I used Van Gogh’s method of creating as my protocol with respect to creating art. In his letters to his brother and in conversations with other artists, Van Gogh would discuss “attacking the canvas.” In other words, he rarely did any preparatory sketches or any sketching on his canvases before applying paint to them when he went out for a day’s work.

I admired this commitment to fate that Van Gogh expressed in his art. But I also realized that oil paintings don’t dry quickly, and colors or shapes that don’t work in a composition can be scraped off, and/or manipulated into more successful situations. As this applies to me and my art, I had for a long time made it a practice to capitalize on accidents. Many of my works are inspired by Jackson Pollock’s completely liberated style of flinging splatters of paint onto canvases.

Lately, I’ve been betraying my mistake making capital in explorations of using the eraser in traditional or digital land. When one is attempting to create geometric inspired plane-scapes without using rulers and compasses, one must make friends with the eraser to arrive at satisfactory and complete works. Art is definitely in an infinite and boundryless universe. Artists just try to frame particles of that universe as best they can with the tools they have using the unique individual filters they were born with and have acquired through the progressions of their lives.

The other ideas that directly relate to this piece are found in its title: Topology of Hearts, Hands, and Minds. Topologies are used to map out computer networks within a business for example. They help to define locations and connections of each computer within a network. My idea here was to create these little spirit beings that have their heads connected to hubs for which they rotate around. You’ll notice that these little spirit beings have single eyes like cyclopses. I had no conscious reasoning for this though. They just looked simpler and more eye-catching.

The hands of each spirit being are joined with one another. The upper torsos of the spirit beings also look like hearts. This was intentional. It was to denote the concept of hearts within spiritual networks. Robert Monroe, in his out of body trilogy books, describes disembodied people or souls as “curls.” I often wondered why he referred to souls as curls; perhaps it’s just the nature of energy as found throughout the universe—whether if that’s draining water, spiraling hurricanes, or revolving galaxies—curls also display this pattern. So, to give this notion of a curl some visual representation, I made this drawing.

Next to last, but not least, the idea expressed here is one of love for one another. We are all interdependent with one another, and we produce higher and higher productions of creation when we join together in friendly synchronized patterns and organizations. Our gestalt formations allow for oversouls of greater power to flow through us and give us more meaning and purpose in our lives. It’s like we create health management organizations with our emotional and spiritual energies in non-physical banks, and we can draw upon this energy the more connected we are to these banks and one another.

In negative forms of these types of organizations, totalitarianism and fascism can develop. Politicians of today are aware of such organizations. These are what give them the power they crave if they can only achieve enough successful corruption and criminal activity to obtain thrones and positions of power over everyone else. And so I tried—in this work of art—to show individual differences between the spirit beings. This is the natural defense you and I have for not losing selfhood to complete collectivism and assimilation.

Ultimately, the vision behind this illustration is intended to inspire true democracy among all peoples of the world.