120?90 cms

Pastels… not sold the original as of March 2007. not SHOWN IT either.
I have been too sick. Well. That tends to mean varieties of mad. But I am a gentle man, I am my hands were made to make and I cannot envision physically hurting someone ELSE.
I have chronic bipolar disorder… it sucks, mostly.

I don’t seem to be able to stop being too hot or too cold. I should probably get a house with air conditioning (I will just spray the conditioner I have in my bathroom up n down and all around and see if that helps.) I USED to have air conditioning at my house – I wrote on the controls in purple felt tip pen “for permed or colour treated air.”
OK well I have done all the remarkably simple tasks necessary for this morning and for me they were mammoth undertakings requiring much sweat and most of all, courage. Just have to ignore all the fear and go DO IT ALL ANYWAY.
Hm…I love the names of paints. Not the ones that they come up with for you to paint your house with. I have always thought I would be good at that though –
For your lounge “winter ferret” and for your kitchen, “happy exploding sunflower” and in your dining room, “fragrant maroon mice” with a split level in “hungry hungry hippo.”
Or not.
Real paints have names like crimson alizarin, burnt umber, spectrum yellow, French ultramarine, titanium white and cobalt blue. Somehow more real they elicit possibility like a blank white canvas or a snow-white untouched high cotton yield watercolour sheet. Like a beach without footprints or a wide green field of soft grass. At the same time they threaten to overwhelm me with their original unsullied beauty.
So, anyhoo, I sit here, naked in the cold because I choose to be, because I don’t care. I do believe, I do, that we are brilliant and unique, random, an act of somewhere silent, sliding through the world on the diamond flaws that everyone tries so hard to believe. Arbitrary, indiscriminately created, hacked open and carved from the world.
I have been remiss but that does not indicate that I have not been paying attention.
The distress abates by degrees, and by degree it returns and haunts and hurts. This is how it has always been.
I have even been up of late, yes directly up not even dysphoric. Can feel my fingers and toes tingle all day for no reason in slow waves of pleasure, hold them before my face, bend at the hip to pick lavender and put it in my pocket. Stretch strong and beautiful in the morning sun.
Just the tantalizing threads of it in my blood making me bite my cheeks and begin, once more, to push the worlds of my mind onto paper, to hold their drifting and stinging forms.
And it surges and falls like the sea, beats like wind against glass in my head. It has been a few days since I felt the irrational pleasure throb through my limbs. But ah, yes ah YES I know it will be back and soon and I will whisper to it and brush its feathers and ask it to stay stay stay.
I have been being very careful. I have not worked to the extent that I know I can, that I am pushed to and pressured in the back of my mind. I have even held back from the truth of my desires and have been making works that are gentle and lyrical. Before the storm. I have rational rationale that I must follow before I get all carried away and covered in paint inside and out. I do feel in a kind of limbo. I don’t know if this is happiness or not. I am lonely and dissatisfaction nests in my mind. Of course, of course. But limbo is better than purgatory and purgatory is better than hell. Often I feel… vague and unreal.
I stare so keenly at the moments days weeks without knowing that I am actually mad – this time, it does not possess the defining edge of reality that the very distortion and pain brings. How odd. Ridiculous.
ABSURD. And while I have this stillness, this ineptitude for subsistence there is always the star monster, world eater, inside me. It is inside us all, somewhere, elsewhere, else-when, telling us, calling to us in the night…
Don’t ever stop asking don’t ever ever stop reaching the answer to the question what is the meaning of life is the question what is the meaning of life.

Breathe the sweet breath of madness tie your mind to itself in switches and arcs of pleasure and lights and pain, in stutters and twitches and flights and bursts of colour in your vision.
We are all so bound to lucidity. To rationalism.

Ah hell. And to it we eventually return.
I wish I was my cat (the cat is dead, long live the cat!)

“I am a brother to dragons
I am a companion to owls.
My skin is black upon me.
And my bones are burned with heat.”

Ah my friends, my loving mad friends. I do so hope we all survive.
Spin through the random sky… faithless, of course. Faith in what?

Paul

her headdress is a fine collection of huge amber beads tipped with coral red coral. her hair is braided into 108 strands - a sacred number from buddhism. the necklaces of dzi beads and red coral are worth a fortune - enough to buy a house in a western country. red and yellow stones and garments are spiritual colors in tibetan culture. 3 silver and gold belts are around her waist, studded with coral and turquoise, considered to provide magical protection. many 24k gold bracelets rest on her wrists and a big gold ring is on every finger

Khampa tibetan festivals feature some of the most astonishing shows of bejewelling in the world. Traditionally nomatter who you are in Khampa society, it would go without saying that you buy jewelry with your money, because that it the most appropriate and traditional store of money. Nomadic people naturally find precious stones and metals the most portable way to keep their wealth. Many ornaments have religious or spirtual meaning, as well as being the objects which store the family history, wealth, and show the family status.

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Ornaments make up most of the life savings of many Khampa families, and so play an important role in Tibetan families' lives as well as in announcing the social status of the wearers. They are saved up for over many years and handed down for centuries from generation to generation within families. Until very recently, these families were nomadic and have to move every few months because of the snowy seasons in the Himalayas, so Khampas have always needed to store their wealth in portable form. So being unable to store wealth in the form of estates or houses or land or in a bank, for millenia wealth has been stored in art, precious fabrics, and particularly into ornaments.

Their culture is very conservative about the type of ornaments favored: for thousands of years jewelry made from amber, turquoise and coral have been worn because the stones are believed to hold spiritual power. Gold and silver and also naturally found in Tibet, and the use of these metals by the wealthy also goes back thousands of years. Their ornaments are very chunky, bold and colorful. While the gold earrings that Khampa women wear may have cost them a year or maybe several year's of their salary, ornaments carry so much social status in their society that probably didn't have to think twice about the purchase.

To the Khampa people these ornaments have the utmost sentimental value and significance, because they are the physical remnants of generations of their ancestors hard work or success. what these people are wearing is not just their life savings, but also their family history and treasure. this culture has been around for millenia - archeological finds from the 1st century AD in the khampa area unearthed ornaments that are essentially the same in design and materials as today's are. there are also beliefs that the stones provide good luck and protection to disease. dyed red coral is the most sought after stone, but interestingly tibet is very very far from any oceans - all the coral is imported by traders! Religious symbols from Tibetan Buddhism frequency form the designs of pieces, however archeological finds show that the role of ornaments in Tibetan society and peoples' lives long predate the arrival of Buddhism in Tibet. Indeed the beliefs of spiritual protection being provided by coral, amber and turquoise probably originate from the ancient shamanic Bon religion.

ANOTHER PHOTO of her is below... (click the thumbnail)