ALMOND EYES MAKE UP

Browsing my archive in search for what might become an upload I came across the photograph above that I took in November 2009. It was one among other stuff I keep in a group labeled “failures”. A quick glance at the original shot would reveal nothing interesting other than some flowers and a butterfly or what looked like one, all set against a lifeless wall made of dust-colored bricks with the in-between cracks being loosely stuffed with cement. This is how it looked when I first downloaded it from my camera last year.


This time there was something new to perceive. While the wall represented impediments hindering or slowing down progress in my life, the flowers and the butterfly bore resemblance to good things: Making friends online and exploring new depths in terms of human relations, enjoying thrilling novels, photography, Flickr, an exciting movie, a lovely song…etc in the time when everything around was not only frustrating but in many times saddening, sometimes seriously!


Realizing that life is far more complicated than a mutely flat wall to speak for and that those impediments had to be felt in some way or another…that hours, days and weeks are never the same and that the ups and downs carry us, we like it or not, from one stage to the next and the next, I sat down with my friends the laptop computer and Adobe Photoshop with a new vision in mind: Writing all that down in a legible and perhaps funny photographic language.


I thought of transparent or nearly transparent columns of somehow different widths to stand for those days and weeks. Now for the columns to play their assigned roles each would be given a particular layer mode and/or opacity level different from the adjacent, to speak in “photoshopic” terms with the varying widths referring to the seriousness of the situations. In this way they would lighten up at times and darken at other times, get wider, that is to say easier now and become narrower, that is harder shortly after…appear refreshing at stage A then depressing at B. Rhythm is out of control as harmony intersects with chaos…the common with the irregular…the predictable with the unexpected!


Gradually and inadvertently I found myself engaged in a world where fancy overlaps with real life and the work started to put on a garment different from being a nearly duplication of some other works intended to shed light on the here and now of my life.


From that point the entire attempt became secondary and even trivial to what my mind was now trying to crack: IMAGINATION!

Searching the net for some info several months ago I remember I was more than astonished to know that Jules Verne, a capable French author wrote in 1865 “De la Terre ŕ la Lune” (From Earth to the Moon) and that H.G. Wells, that brilliant British novelist whose “Kipps” I studied at high school did publish his scientific fiction “The First Men in the Moon” in 1901. The idea that the two great men had such admirable talents to conceive of such great ideas DECACEDS before NASA was impressively capable of replacing the word “fiction” with “Fact” proved to me how great achievements could be traced back to some daring dreams of brilliant people.


Now that I had something more serious to busy my mind with, I ended the amusing dialogue I was having with Mr. Photoshop, shut down the computer and started a new mental journey.


What occurred to me next had its roots in the book of Genesis. “God saw all that he had made – and it was very good!” Genesis 1:31 it was so clear now that our God, the most genius and the most creative ever, had that trait: Imagination or the ability to imagine things even before they come into existence. He saw all that he had made and it was very good!!! Where does that lead? Doesn’t it mean that the most brilliant designer, the most creative engineer ever had mental sketches? designs? Perhaps even prototypes that He worked on over what “we” regard as “giant periods of time”, resulting in what we now call “evolution”? For me it is certain that all were in His creatively creative mind long before He decided to roll up His sleeves for hard work! Having finished the creation and now examining His marvelous masterpieces I can imagine Him admiring the fact that whatever He did did exactly match His earlier visions (imaginations) and as if saying “All our calculations were so accurate… all designs so perfect…ALL IN ALL IS SO GREAT”…


Now what does that have to do with you and me? Well, we, human beings, are said to fall under the “Animal Kingdom” category. A scientific theory that held and will continue to hold true as long as we have our “mental eyes” wearing the glasses of materialism and as long as we keep examining “only” our “physical” existence and that under the microscopic lens of our hi-tech biolabs. Genius, creative and open-minded like Sir. Charles Robert Darwin we might be regarded yet with our perspectives still imprisoned within the boundaries of “traditional scientific criteria”…the

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