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It takes a certain amount of trust to complete an action. Upon a whim, I’d recently researched the root words of the word “confidence.” People use this word all the time to explain something we all intuitively understand. Or do we really? I didn’t, because after realizing I had no idea what the root words were to construct a meaning from the word confidence, I really didn’t know what it meant.

I already knew the prefix “con” means with, or together. So I found that the root word “fid” comes from the Latin fidere, which means to trust, or to have faith. I realized, then, that confidence really means to have faith, or to trust in something together with that thing or person: to have faith together. Confidence now sounds like a religious conviction.

This makes sense to me, because even science can’t explain the nature of reality at its most elemental level still due to “quantum freakiness.” So what we have on our level of physical existence is really an unquestioning faith in something or someone because that person or thing has exhibited patterns that have been repeated countless times.

After further investigation into the Latin “fidere,” I found that it is used in another word called fiducial. Fiducial is often used in the financial field. It relates to trust funds and so forth. So there’s the root meaning of trust found in fiducial. It can also mean “reliable,” which is really just a synonym for trust and faith.

I thought that the title Fiducial Mechanics would be a good fit to give meaning to this image. Muscles, joints, mechanics and pivot points are expressed in this picture. It takes faith to move. That’s what I’m implying. How is it that acetylcoline transmits from your neuromuscular junctions? It all happens mostly in the unconscious bodily processes.

I theorize that matter really isn’t the dead, mechanical stuff that mainstream science still likes to portray it as. I believe that the whole universe is teaming with intelligence, even if it is so obscure, and hidden from the intelligences us humans have evolved so far in our own conscious developments. It took certain measurements of time to finally secure reliable movements and behaviors in the chemical processes our bodies perform, and these processes were accomplished by different forms of conscious awareness.

The reason why this painting is along the lines of my Masks of Human Emotion theme is because this is what it often times looks like when the masks are taken off. Even in America’s liberal culture of expressing oneself freely, I’d say that people still have a multitude of masks given to them by the various institutions of our times. I suppose etiquette is one word that succinctly describes broad swaths of what I’m getting at here.

Etiquette is a sort of governing order that keeps groups of people in harmony and in line with the group’s interactivity. While individuals within the group may not agree with one another on one topic or another, everyone generally stays within the boundaries of what is socially acceptable to talk about and discuss. It’s usually a fear of criticism and rejection that keeps individuals within the boundaries of what a group’s social etiquette has delineated as an unwritten standard.

Large portions of a person’s character, identity, and creativity often get suppressed in the name of stability, harmony, and collective continuity, regardless of how rotten that collective state may be when heavily invested in groups. Groups range from kids who like the same music, to families attending a certain church, to political parties, all the way to extreme cult groups.

While groups, in themselves, aren’t necessarily harmful, they do require certain portions of human expression and emotion to be suppressed in favor of other expressions and emotions. If a person can detach from any sort of group with relative ease so as to reflect and express the suppressed feelings on one’s own, then all is well. The group can even be healthy.

It is when a group dominates, and takes over a person’s identity that the group becomes unhealthy in my opinion. What happens with the emotions, thoughts and feelings that don’t fit in with the group’s standards is that they become antithetical, not okay, and polarized into an unconscious state. They don’t go away either. In fact they build. Their energies are only allowed expression through the filters of a group’s standards.

This painting gives a visual description of a few of the underground emotions and feelings lurking behind the masks we have crafted for society, and that society has crafted for us. It is also reminiscent of when I used to be a landscaping supervisor at Loving Homes Greens in Riverside, California. I used to train and manage young men who elites would define as the lower classes of society. There was much drama involved in this, and many things were expressed out in the fields on hot Summer days that society normally suppresses in order to fit in and be pleasing to the managerial classes of society.

There are five different sources from which this image is derived. Two of those sources are my own hand drawn images, and the three others were images obtained from the internet. One of them is an image of vessels taken from a fluoroscopy, another one is a circular fiduciary marker, and the one you can see in the foreground–the blue and teal colored form–is actually a picture of the fire tornado that was recently seen in the California fires this year (2014).

I’d been considering how imprinting works in many different domains, physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. One comparison I’d recently read about is the type-writer ball. A type ball has the letters or characters of an alphabet on it, and spins accordingly to the correct character when a key is punched on the keyboard. That’s how typewriters from the 20th century were.

In many ways, people are like type characters in that they imprint the external world, and even their internal worlds, with their thoughts, feelings, actions, and energies. This image sort of looks like a type ball, or it can be compared to it at least. So many of the symbols represented in the selections combined in the creation of this picture seem to allude to an imprinted and imprinting soul.

The circle itself is a symbol of the self, as Carl Jung indicated in his research as a psychoanalyst. You can barely see the fiduciary marker coming through from the bottom layer here but it is basically the black and white colors you see coming through all the cracks . Fiduciary markers are used to mark locations in the body before a patient undergoes surgery for a certain procedure in his or her body, thus an imprinting is done to accomplish this.

The words I chose to title this piece indicate a character who has full authority to brand his or her world with fire. Branding with fire used to be done by ranchers in order to mark their cattle with a distinct character so as to distinguish one rancher’s cattle from another’s. I reversed the colors on the fire tornado–which you can see in the foreground on the lower right of this picture–so that the colors are different hues of blue. Normally, yellow, orange, and red are associated with fires, but natural gas can be blue when it’s emitted as a flame from a stove for example.

There is enough yellow and red anyway characterizing the picture that it easily communicates a sense of heat; a heat we are all experiencing this Spring and Summer.

What we really have here is a play on words that got a little out of hand. You see, of course, the letters N-O-O-N at the bottom of this image, and they are undulated by and wound up in various entwining layers.

There’s a moth in the upper right that I used again for this particular series–the A series to my Wrecked Tangles (After the Crash) online art project. Briefly, After the Crash is intended to communicate foreknowledge of an impending crash in the global economy, and Wrecked Tangles is, yet, another play on words meaning to communicate “rectangles.”

So about the title to this piece… well, see, I was out downtown on Friday night, and when I left from walking around and talking to people, I got in my truck and thought of a different way of spelling “theoretician.” I broke apart the word into separate words, thus re-creating it into: The Or @ician. I really didn’t know what to do about the last six letters, as I couldn’t find a creative way to re-represent them.

“No One’s Frenzy” is a revision of “noon” for which you see at the bottom of this image. Noon can be reconstructed into no one. And the fact that there’s a moth dive bombing towards the capital letters at the bottom of the picture sort of conveys a moth-like frenzy at noon time. The image could really make a good piece for people to marvel and wonder over at a dive bar during the noon hour.

Originally, I thought of titling this painting as “They Twisted My Words.” This was to convey a message from the man Christian history calls Jesus. When I painted this painting, I hadn’t read too many different perspectives and histories about the western bible, but I had a suspicion that many of the messages written in the bible were actually twisted and distorted so as to serve the purposes of holding power over people from the centralized religion of Christianity.

I had struggled with some of the teachings contained in the bible years ago, and sometimes I still do. This painting is supposed to represent what Jesus actually taught as opposed to what many twisted souls teach within the corrupted edifices of the Christian religion.

It’s not my intent, again, to try to proselytize anything with this piece. I really don’t have any insecurities concerning what religion anyone practices.

The human face central to this piece is the face of Jesus, and the mask inferiorly superimposed over the posterior side of his face is a continuation on the theme of my Masks of Human Emotion motif. So Jesus represents the true self symbolically, and the mask represents the societally crafted mask that those in various capacities of power have helped to create for everyone through education and religion.

The pills off to the left represent the anti-depressant drug called Prozac. This is what is called an SSRI, or selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor. This is just a fancy way of saying the chemical serotonin in your brain, which is a chemical that makes you relax, gets inhibited from passing through your neurotransmitters, thereby creating an overload of release of serotonin and causing you to feel better about things in general. Well, that was one of the intents of this medicine anyway.

What we have now in our culture, however, is many depressed, and psychotic people, who take this drug, or a derivative of it, and get even more imbalanced. Most of the cases involved in the shooting rampages in the last few years included this kind of drug in the prescriptions of the characters who carried out the atrocities. But of course the media won’t report on that because they are mega-corporations who have agreements with Eli Lily, which is a big pharmaceutical corporation. In other words, profits are more important than morals or ethics to the centralized entities running America’s economy today.

The targets, and the arrow going through one of them, symbolize what sin actually means. Sin really means “missing the mark,” or being in error with respect to perception and judgement. Much of what we interpret in our world is erroneous, and based on false beliefs about ourselves and others. Hence, sin becomes a whole interdependent world in which we all have to work it out with each other.

The multiple fish-hooks on the right symbolize the passage in the bible in which Jesus tells his disciples “I’ll make you fishers of men.” I didn’t fully understand that passage until later in my life when I learned more about marketing and psychology. 

The stairways descending upward into the upper background of this painting obviously denote a “stairway to heaven.” I think I was listening to a lot of Led Zeppelin when I was working on this piece back in 1996.

This is the second painting I made concerning the mask theme in my career as an artist. It was painted after I’d graduated from high school, and was in college. I wanted to explore the mosaic style as expressed in oil paint some more at this period in my art, so you can see the pixelations on the masks as orderly strokes of oil.

I got the word “quaternity” from reading one of Carl Jung’s books on psychology. I think the specific volume is called Archetypes of the Unconscious from which I’d learned of this word. Jung was describing a psychological, symbolic, and archetypal concept using the word quaternity as an extrapolation from the concept of the trinity for which most people are familiar with.

In the trinity, there are things like unconscious, conscious, and superconscious; or, body, mind, and soul. In terrestrial terms, there is land, sea, and air. In religious terms, specifically Christianity, there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This painting, and this blog, however, is not intended to instill a specific religion’s message.

According to Jung’s quaternarian archetype, there is a fourth character that is introduced to a trinitarian model. Usually the fourth character is sort of a shady character. For example, to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost can be added Satan, hence completing the quaternity. Or, to the trinity of land, sea, and air can be added the fourth domain of space, which, indeed is quite dark considering the fact that most of the universe is now supposedly composed of dark matter, according to scientists, and astrophysicists.

So, to introduce the quaternarian model to the idea of the human masks, or the chemical/psychological masks we all wear in our relations with one another, I created this painting as a second step in that direction. None of the masks executed by the executant in this painting necessarily convey a dark, evil intent, but that’s not really the function of masks anyway. Masks are usually crafted so as to cover up, or obnubilate intent.

The mask theme develops in subsequent paintings, as I’ll show you in the future, but for now, I leave you with this painting to ponder in your daily meanderings as your moods change, your faces change, and your relationships diversify and/or simplify.

This is the first painting I ever made concerning an idea I had been thinking about around the 1992-1993 Winter era. It is a painting I made in high school, so there are amateur elements to it. I’m not too concerned about that though. I think the act of creating art is a risk one takes. Albeit, a social risk, but nonetheless, it still is a risk of being mocked, misunderstood, or criticized.

It is understood in science now that we all possess nocireceptors in our nervous system which are basically nervous receptors for pain. What researchers have found, more to my point here, is that people actually experience pain in these receptors, though there may be no immediate physical impacts upon one’s body. A person can witness seeing someone else get hurt, and their nocireceptors react with pain to the observed situation.

This brings me to the notion of the social masks we all wear so that we can function and interact with one another on a daily basis. Our masks are the roles we play for anyone in our lives. Some masks can be quite deceptive to the people around us so as not to let on to any clues about how one really feels.

Taken a step further, people often feel so unworthy and rejected by others (though this may be false belief patterns) that they decide to take psychotropic drugs advertised to them in the media so that they will think, feel, and interact with others “better” and will have a “stable” life that doesn’t create drama and depression.

After all this conditioning is experienced in a person’s day, he or she goes home, and goes into his or her room and closes the door so that solitude and reflection can be had once again. When this happens, the masks are taken off, and a person is once again “real” and more honest with his or herself.

During this time in my life, half of my day was in class at high school, so I painted this painting during art class to express something I didn’t necessarily have a desire to put into words. I was also very into the band Bauhaus, and there was a single that I bought via mail order called Terror Couple Kill Colonel that they made. The title for that song actually pertained to a news story that the members of Bauhaus decided to use for lyrics in one of their songs. On the cover of that single are some masks hanging from a hook. Here’s a link to that song and the cover of the single I’m writing about… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN0woWd4Tj8

In my attempts to salvage this series into something I felt more satisfied with, I decided to zoom in on some of the details composing the multi-layered surfaces of previous manipulations. The details look random and natural enough to escape the overly controlling conscious mind, and that is part of the reason why I wanted to reveal the nakedness of losing control in this manner through an expression of art.

You can see random words and letters strewn about in a semi-orderly fashion, though they don’t necessarily form sentences for comprehension however. I’m attempting to show a roughness, and crudeness; a child-like, though almost brutal truth. Stress is exhibited throughout the picture plane here. It’s a panorama of texture and media.

I thought of the title for a moment, and saw the diagram of a tongue in the lower left hand corner of the image. The upside down word “Latin” can also be seen in the upper left hand area of the picture. Latin and tongues obviously associate with language and linguistics, so I associated this with the sound of the word “tungsten.” A street plasters its way across the picture in a crook-neck fashion, and I thought of all the names that pass you by when you drive or walk down a street passed intersecting streets. Hence, the name “Tungsten Street” became pertinent in my mind as a title for this piece.