For this week’s creative prompt at Inspire Me Thursday, Melanie offers a poem by Rumi.  If you read it very slowly, it might call out to you, awaken your senses:

Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down
in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language
- even the phrase “each other” -
do not make any sense.

Yes, this world we live in doesn’t always make sense so I drew windows of swirling possibilities, an abstract interpretation of this week’s theme.  I started to write out the poem with a portrait layout, but found myself wanting to turn the page to a landscape view when I started to begin the layers of soft pastels. Possibly an subconcious move that we need to change our perspective…in times such as these you have to ask yourself…do you turn to the grass to escape reality or to gather renewed strengthen, energy, and hope?

I was surfing today and came across the website of Leonardo Solaas. I have to say that I am quite impressed at how he uses interesting techniques of visualizing data to create artistic images. One of his nifty projects, Dreamlines, allows users to enter search terms and then the application uses Google’s image search. Pixels become data values which are then compiled to form a constantly changing and shifting image. I used the search term “surrealmuse” to create the images here in the post.

Another project, Migrations, takes two completely different sources and smashes their data together. The first source consists of random fragments of The Quixote, the second comes from randomly selected words from the world news of the day according to the BBC. The words from both sources tangle with one another to form an interesting visual set. Salaas says that “…letters migrate between them to show the simple fact that, in spite of all their distances, they are made of the same stuff. The foundations of our culture, the accounts of the world we live in: all is language.”

His site has quite a bit more fun applications and is definitely worth a visit.

[Leonardo Salaas]

Here is the finished piece of artwork I created at the Art after Dark event at the Tampa Museum of Art. It’s part of my recent series in exploring abstract designs. Since I’m working with larger works of art now, it’s taking longer to scan them in. I’ve actually got a stack of new work awaiting to be scanned and finally framed.

So far this weekend’s been pretty amazing. We checked out the 2012 show on Friday night. Brian got a ton of great footage that he’ll be going through soon to upload another YouTube video. Then today we had a little party at our place with some new and old friends.
Next Friday, we’ll be going to Permission to Spreak Freely @ International Bazaar in Centro Ybor. It is a venue for all artists and musicians to perform or show pieces of their creative abilities whether it’s through spoken word, visual creations, dance…you name it. It’s a great way to get exposure, make new friends, or just be entertained. So come check it out if you’re in the area.