I always knew that art would be part of my life. In one form or another. I was born in 1986 in Normandy, during my childhood I suffered from school phobia, then from anxiety disorder in adolescence. Imagination, poetry, drawing have always been a kind of protection against the chaos that reigns outside.
My father suffered from schizophrenia and my universe comes from this particular relationship with madness and disorder. In 2018 when my father committed suicide, I completely immersed myself in art. I still suffer from anxiety disorder, some days are harder than others, but one day at a time I am moving forward. Several months ago I started working with fabric. I sew human beings, nature, forests, rivers but above all I sew myself. This is what has changed in my new artistic work, I am no longer in the expression in traumas but in healing. It is much more than symbolic to sew. There is this idea of stitching up scars.
written by Alicia Lasne
In this work, which dates from 2019-2020, there is the representation of madness, of the depths.
In this work, which dates from 2020-2021, there is a kind of acceptance of madness, of the darkness of the human soul.
Then finally, my current work, where we really see the change with this desire for healing
My plan was to kiss the woman at the bakery counter, but the manager rushed forward and whacked me on the head with a spoon. He recites Homer on Sundays, though not when it’s raining, and he takes no chances with troublesome dreamers like me.
Forbidden steps Collageby Gary Cummiskey
At the side of the road
There were headless mannequins lying at the side of the road with so many cars moving slowly past and not a single driver stopping to take a closer look or even perhaps load them into the boot and take them home
Sensation desired Collageby Gary Cummiskey
Door to door
She waits in front of a door propped up in the sand somewhere in the Kalahari She does not see the woman on the other side of the door kneeling down and peering through the keyhole She sees only the man in the green jacket walking away in the distance with a cat at his side
Love&Lust Collageby Gary Cummiskey
Zoo
Standing behind the iron bars I peer down at the animals When I look up again at the sun I vomit blood from my nostrils and my eyes turn black like their fur
i know what i like Collage by Gary Cummiskey
Underground currents
A thin man with a walking stick and a balloon in the cobblestone streets of the war-torn city. She turns, rushing through the underground currents.
Gary Cummiskey is a poet and publisher living in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the founder of Dye Hard Press, which he started in 1994. He is the author of several poetry chapbooks. His selected poems, Outside the cave, was published in 2021. In 2009, with Eva Kowalska, he compiled Who was Sinclair Beiles?, a collection of writings about the South African Beat poet. An expanded edition was published in 2016. His short story collection, Off-ramp, was short-listed for the 2014 Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award. His work has been published in the UK, US, France, Denmark, Sweden, India, Egypt, and Greece
Featured Photo: Lets Hope, Collage by Gary Cummiskey
THIS WRITING IS AN AUTHORIZED DUPLICATION WITH PERMISSION AND EXPRESSED CONSENT
Uche Nduka was born in Nigeria to a Christian family. Raised bilingual in Igbo and English, he earned his BA from the University of Nigeria and his MFA from Long Island University, Brooklyn. He left Nigeria in 1994 and settled in Germany after winning a fellowship from the Goethe Institute. He lived in Germany and Holland for the next decade and immigrated to the United States in 2007. Nduka is the author of numerous collections of poetry and prose, including Living in Public (2018), Nine East (2013), Ijele (2012), and eel on reef (2007), all of which were published after he arrived in the United States. Earlier collections include Heart’s Field (2005); If Only the Night (2002); Chiaroscuro (1997), which won the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize; The Bremen Poems (1995); Second Act (1994); and Flower Child (1988). Belltime Letters (2000) is a collection of prose. His work has been translated into German, Finnish, Italian, Dutch, and Romanian.
The collective art making project, Cornucopia, began in 2010 when artists Rik Lina (Netherlands), Gregg Simpson (Canada) and John Welson (Wales) began mailing each other works, an invitation to the next artist to contribute to the finished piece. I have always thought of this collective as akin to a free jazz trio, which is my background as a jazz drummer and Rik and John as avid listeners for decades. I see Rik, especially with his swooping ink lines, as the saxophone, John with his rolling earthy forms as the bass and myself adding percussive color and texture. In this case writer Allan Graubard, our guest ‘vocalist’, has written text for a select group of images by Cornucopia from past years. His writing keys in to the vivid imagery, but he insists his singing is always off key! If that’s that case, let atonality reign supreme.
-Gregg Simpson, 2022
Holy Smoke Rik Lina, Gregg Simpson and John Welson
That night, when a large red praying mantis landed on her bedroom window with a soft thud, the window before the desk where she was writing, she lifted her head up and smiled. Nothing could be so vulgar, she thought, than this creature who, because of its cunning, mastery of camouflage, and sharp powerful tearing spines claimed the world it inhabited. For her, of course, vulgarity was a prize. The more vulgar a creature was to her – human, animal, fish, bird or insect – the greater its power.
She used the term as well from its root: tawdry, flamboyant, garish, brash, loutish, crude, brassy, rude and as common as possible. A perfect amalgam to paste together her curious tales into a medium that the cheapest lowlife enjoyed. So they did, and the prizes and checks and film offers came, one after another, two at a time, until she didn’t give a damn who made them or how well or how poorly they did for a public she evaded, preferring her solitude above all else in this make believe vicious whirlwind she conducted as if her life depended on it – which, no “as ifs” needed, it did.
The Table Is Set Rik Lina, Gregg Simpson and John Welson
Field agent’s B16 report, initially filed per directive at his local office, quickly found its way to the national director. He read it, wrote up the affidavit for a search warrant and sent it on to a judge. After due process, the judge approved it. The director ordered the special squad to suit up and get to it.
At stake was nothing less than the ability to breathe, bite, breaststroke, battle and belittle. That the latter had less to do with the former than a frog does with a bottle of milk had nothing to do with it. Since the evening of the 12th when laughter replaced cognition and water balloons exploded on the street, moonglow dousing us all, everything was in flux. This included every prevarication sewn into a leafy flower, each busted safety valve worth saving, two or three aural visions and walking upside down. Enumerative, exhausting, eruptive? Quite.
They’d done whatever they wanted to, those bipedal harems, living in red brick row houses stained with coal smoke. Ah, that coal smoke …
Thereafter the lexicon unraveled, uproarious, horizontal, striking its own match to the torch that seared a name across the case: Agamemnon.
So that was it.
Murder, murder and judgement.
Neither the national director nor any of his assistants testified. They didn’t have to. The lawyers argued over the instrument but blood tells all. Even deer licking a twilight barbecue cued up, hooves hot to applaud.
And when it came down, the heavens parted and great sassafras babies with thick chocolate lashes stirred the witchy soup that feeds us …
Featured Photo False Prophet Rik Lina, Gregg Simpson and John Welson
(The Netherlands 1942) lived and worked on different continents, preferably in wild nature, as a way of life using Odilon Redon’s advise: “Immerse yourself into nature!”. For this he dedicated life and art to study the deserts, the mountains, tropical rainforest- and coral reef jungles. In 1975, the emigration to the Caribbean island of Bonaire became an essential experience for his work with more than a thousand hours of scuba-diving. A major part of his drawing, painting and graphic work represents poetry and life of the pelagic realms, next to his explorations of the jungles of cloud forests and inner space.
A prolific and critically recognized artist and musician, has exhibited his paintings, drawings, and works on paper throughout Canada, the US, Europe, South America and Asia. His work is included in several academic studies, art history books and journals published in Canada, Europe, and Australia and has been exhibited in several historical surveys on surrealism and abstraction.
began painting at the age of 12. He received a thorough education in painting, drawing, graphics, ceramics and attended two colleges of art. He has participated in over 300 exhibitions in both private and public galleries around the world since the early 1970’s. From the late 1960’s to the early 1990’s he painted Figurative Surrealist Paintings, exhibiting with artists as diverse as Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, Lucian Freud and Damian Hirst. Since the mid 1990’s he has produced Lyrical Abstracted Paintings inspired by the landscape of his native Wales.
Allan Graubard
is a poet, writer, and playwright with works translated in numerous languages. His plays have premiered in the U.S. and EU. He is the editor of and contributing author to Into the Mylar Chamber: Ira Cohen (Fulgur, UK, 2019), American liaison for and contributing author to the International Encyclopedia of Surrealism (Bloomsbury, UK, 2019), and editorial advisor for and contributing author to A Phala: Revisita do Movimento Surrealista (Sao Paolo, Brazil, 2015). Forthcoming in 2020 is a new book of poems and tales, Western Terrace (Exstasis Editions, Victoria, BC) while 2019 saw Language of Birds, a collaboration with artist Rik Lina (Anon Editions, NY/Flagstaff). In 2017, A Crescent by Any Other Name, selected tales, published (Anon Editions, NY/LA). That same year he was co-editor of and contributing author to The Art of Conduction: A Conduction Workbook by the renowned conductor-composer Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris (Karma Books, NY), with whom he was a principal collaborator for over three decades. Other titles of fiction and poetry are: Sirenes (Phasm Press, NY), Targets (Anon Editions, NY/LA), And tell tulip the summer (Quattro Books, Toronto), and Roma Amor, with photographs by Ira Cohen (Spuyten Duyvil Press, NY). He was co-editor of the expansive, two-volume: Invisible Heads: Surrealists in North America – An Untold Story (Anon Editions, NY/LA) and guest editor of and contributing author to a centennial celebration of poet Gherasim Luca (Hyperion, Contra Mundum Press, NY).
“The time will come to assert the ideas of women at the expense of those of men, whose failure is consummated so resoundingly today. It is up to the artist in particular, if only in protest against this scandalous state of affairs, to make everything that arises from the feminine system of the world as opposed to the masculine system predominate to the maximum; of emphasizing exclusively the powers of women; better still, of appropriating her to the point of making it jealously hers, of that which distinguishes her from man in her way of evaluating and wanting.” André Breton, Arcanum 17
17 Star Tarot Card 9in x 6 1/2in André Breton Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren
This is another example of the surrealist passion for tarot. The title of Breton’s long prose poem, Arcane 17, refers to tarot card 17, the “stars” card (Les étoiles), usually a symbol of free-flowing love and renewal of forces. However, Breton’s imagination brought new associations, multiplying the morning stars and infusing them with fluid meanings. Breton describes the figure in the center of the card as a naked young woman kneeling as she pours out the contents of two urns, one into a pond, the other onto the ground. He associates this woman with the legendary figure of Mélusine, a legendary mermaid who became a symbol of the difficulty to reconcile “reality” and “magic.” There is hope, however, that the “inexhaustible” urns could renew our disenchanted world. Indeed, even though the pond gives off the “pestilential odor” of social conventions, it is still longing for “a new dream.” The fragile butterfly is another symbol of “consoling mystery.” Chilean painter Roberto Matta designed the four colorful illustrations in the shape and size of tarot cards (or “arcanas”) pasted in the book.
Love descending incandescent and calm from the primordial nature of the universe to embrace the hope full of your walk in your women’s hands that welcome in your womb container of light on your lips that educate and dismiss poetry on your back that holds the arcanum of the morning with that epiphany that looks like your body. This is how I take flight rebellious bathed by the celestial of the bodies wrongly called celestial, where I learned to love the brevity of the possible in the impossible to go up with my luggage to another utopia clearing away the old tears in front of a showcase that is empty and that is condescending with my people in its persistent lack where I also know my measurements and who excessively hugs them in these hours of opaque tides with their lost leviathans of heads sunk in the mud of consumption without noticing the hands of those who ask between remains of bodies that are invisible to him and alien.
Morning Prayer Monroe Tsa Toke
A star, as Bernard Roger recalls, “has served forever as a guide to nocturnal navigators whether over the oceans of the globe or over the philosophical sea of the Argonauts.” Echoing him, Jorge Camacho notes the star “has shown the solitary sailor his route over the high seas. By faithfully following it throughout his long voyage, he is sure to reach port safely.” The star burns with such an intense gleam in the surrealist imaginal realm that in 2004, the Czech painter Martin Stejskal organized a large exhibition near White Mountain in which it “was declined in all its natural, cultural, as well as mythical aspects, in the union of traditions (astrology, kabbalah, alchemy, Freemasonry) as in the poetic union of the male and female in each individual, borne by the work of surrealist friends, and by the uncarved stone placed at the castle entrance that bore this phrase that sings in our hearts like a magical couplet: constructed on the side of abyss, on philosopher’s stone . . .” as Marie Dominique Massoni points out in issue 5 of S.U.R.R. However, “You can never see this star like I saw it. You don’t understand: it is like the heart of a heartless flower,” as Nadja, the “magician,” says.,,
A harmony founded on the spiritual in all its forms, love of humanity in all its beauty, we can thus clearly see the richness of the esoteric domain approached this way by the surrealists, who incidentally made the Star, in the Deck of Marseille, the symbol for the suit of Dreams, whose face cards are Lautréamont, Alice in Wonderland, and Freud. This deck was conceived (these things are never invented) between the Villa Air Bel and the café Au Brûleur de Loups.
Star Tarot Symbolique Maçonnique Deck by Jean Beauchard
“A very powerful myth continues to have a hold on me, and no apparent contradiction of it in the course of my previous adventures can prevail “Find the place in the formula” merges with, “possess truth in one soul and one body: That the highest hope has the power to unfold before it the allegorical arena which holds that every human being was thrown into life to search for a being of the opposite sex and only that one who is paired in all respects, to the point where one without the other seems like the result of the dissociation of dismembering a unit of light”
Hunting for the sound In the relation between circles Grooves and ridges On the surface of a disk.
Hunting for the circles Grooves and ridges On the surface Of my fingers.
Hunting for the relation Between the surface of my fingers And the surface of the disk.
Does the sound get sharper when the lines are brighter?
Shell it cough if dust occupies it?
Mother and Child 70x50cm Acrylic on canvas
Hunting in the needle That touches the round lines ln the rotation of the disk
ln one direction In the possibilities of emptiness forms Between the needle point And the turning lines’
Hunting To reach the spherical emptiness There In the middle.
Circles turn with the sound
Breath
Go through ideas and trajectories The time decomposes itself Into spirals moving up and down
And I find myself there. Every time I remember my face I see the sun
This disk that moves And nobody sings For it.
The Celestial Cow 70x50cm Acrylic on canvas
Sometimes you through your darts And they catch a map
it might not necessarily be your map
And by chance or coincidence
you find it in your hand you say: I found the map There the map found me
And my mission now is to dissect it
Sometimes you throw your darts And they get lost Hunting others’ maps
They are the laziest: They through their dreams at you to realize it for them
they threw you their disappointments to endure it for them
They are the laziest And you are the naïve prey that lost the reason of this one hunt
For the hunt And sank
When they pull you up Do not be Please Thankful.
So who said that the emptiness in the middle Is black?
And how do you know it is empty it self? And if someone tells You Nothing is in the emptiness
Would you believe?
Won’t you hunt in this “Nothing”
For a shape or a form?
To touch it?
To intersect with it?
To find yourself
In it?
From MAP OF THE SELF Poems and Drawings Hoda Hussein 2006
Huda Hussein with My Egypt
Hoda Hussein Egyptian creative writer poetess and novelist, artist painter and translator. Published many poetry books and novels in Arabic language. Represented Egypt in poetry and novels festivals and encounters in several countries like Yemen, Spain, India, France, Cuba, and Chile Made creative writing workshops for kids in many schools in Cairo Egypt. Received rewards for poetry, novels and for translations in Chile, Macedonia and Egypt. Was entitled as a universal ambassador for peace by the peace ambassadors circle that works under the UNESCO
Featured Painting: The Great Lady. 70x50cm. Acrylic on canvas.
THIS AN AUTHORIZED DUPLICATION WITH PERMISSION AND EXPRESSED CONSENT
It is then when the tree that tomorrow will summon the thorns loses its leaves, and the bumblebee falls, prey to the polar trails, to reinvent the powerful patient engineering of lytic promises, Well, that’s where I shelter, and where I rescue the omens, there I drink from the Paleozoic salts, which today move the migratory herds, those who come to the eyes without ears, of those attending Sunday services. By nature, I approve!!
They speak of love, and my bet is more on compassion, which is a kind of continuum in a collective warp, of an ineffable equation that they will never understand. Because perhaps love (like that image shown to us) does not exist and if it does exist it is a sum of chemical reactions where a set of hormones stimulates our syntax, and which may also be subject to the need for genes to be perpetuated. Maybe?. But there is also one who breaks this previous theory; crazy love, passionate love, eternal love, etc. that love that becomes unclassifiable. I only know that I know nothing. After all, I believe in love. Does the egg use the chicken to make more eggs? It is possible, but in a global and precisely circular analysis, the plot of existence is supported in a shed crossed by the polyform reality of infinite logics and illogics, where each of its corresponding paradoxes and balances avoids its critical tension. But, we can order them in the not well understood compassion, which could be a feeling deeper than that of the corruptible flesh (physical theory and cognitively plausible), which leads to understandable and celestial simplicity. But what if an infinitesimal were more than an integer, or if that time circulated in all directions? or love will not mean more than a necessary impulse to take risks in order to live the contradictions, so that the soul, when dying, will return with the pertinent knowledge to correct, deconstruct or ratify the whole of the so-called divinity . For this reason, the next step opens the temporality to dedicate more time to essential reflection, and to put aside an imposed competitiveness for the accumulation of objects that lead to the void that means pursuing a way of life that is subordinated to the symbolic relationship. of the object or objects, which is useless and inconducive (a simulacrum of the society of the spectacle) for our true purpose in this brief transit called life. Ars longa vita brevis. Or your existence is just an accident to offer a limited amount of data to accompany the equation that gives additional information to find the way out of the answer. By the way; nobody takes me into account, since my infallibility is very poor since periodically and statistically, my failures are more abundant than my certainties. And therein lies my wisdom; in realizing that my hypotheses are only attempts to find the truth within infinity. To think otherwise would be to err drastically and in the process lie to them. It would be, subjecting myself from the ego to an option to dress elegantly, but in the end, it would strip my limits. It is better to be honest in clumsiness than false in an inane and temporary charade. But: What if love were one of that unknown design in my intrinsic astral writing, waiting for you?
Primordial circulation approaching from a past spring, acrylic on Fabriano paper 250 gm. 35x45cm
So the wide dividing width will unload its useful molecules in this useless impertinent distance there where the lightning reigns without asking for their blind blows. Is when my pale measures they embrace their designs devoid of elytra to save the waters possessed of salt and fire that bathe the limits of my suffering body without entering the first cause that brings me down from within the muscle periphery.
Eros Phasianidae, acrylic and ink on Canson 300 gms paper. 11″ x 8.3
EROS PHASIANIDAE Yo And she saw the chicken rise from the ground a brilliant and ectoplasmic epiphany and she remembered the words of the feathered prophets: “before the primordial egg was the verb” and the pyrrhic evolutionary expedition embraced me so necessary and indeterminate where we are more but under sheds and I saw the grayish uncertainty that shakes my being h = 6.626 0693 (11) x 10 – (34) J. s = 4,135 667 43 (35) x10–(15)eV. s and the beast arose from the miasma without the feminine warmth it was in the offensive of the arches thousands of years ago on the Cartesian line of Har Meggido under the law of y = m x + b and those tears originated at 32°34’59″N 35°10’56″E. II huge old stars leaning out on the horizontal cobblestone sheets were dictated by an ancient manual of glorious epic forms where I did not read the cunning locks and from there lights fall like eagles that are suspended in front of your pale fortifications and despite the fact that I descend without air I cling to the desiccated edges of this abyss turning away from the waves of floral promises with summer mentions that anoint you. Thus the amaranth silence returns to rock the star and like the silent lymph you seek to break beyond the fundamental shell the one that you got to know in a primitive way in the sweet rooms of belief.
Interruption, acrylic on cut Fabriano paper, on black cardboard. 18x24cm. The inclination of one of the elements is voluntary.
GOLDEN VISION
The nothing, the void hold my duplicate fragments (Φ2 = 2.61803398874988…) It is the hollowness of the past and the future what you don’t have and don’t want the illusion of time and line Infinity so love surrounds swelling wisdom while on the musty boards of a camp absent light filters to tilt reciprocal reality that drives your transformation (1/Φ = 0.61803398874988).
Maybe this reality is true on this twilight island where the already worn bones falter by the persistent violet stings, and there is no choice but to live among the cyclones that guard the whimsical and invisible knots with its container meshes that hide half-open portals, those that I will leave like this for a while, since everything circulates in the promised packaging.
I discovered Photomorphosis way back in 1972 while attempting to copy an illustrated article in the Times magazine article on Yves Tanguy on an office copy machine. At night, in the dark. A clandestine maneuver. Photomorphosis is the enchanting process by which an organism changes or experiences metamorphosis under the influence of light… It is a natural process in the realm of photosynthesis, photolysis, etc., indicating the importance of light on living things, akin to shedding light on the darker areas of the mind…
A Wedding in the gardens of Yemen 2021
As an external organic process entering another level of meaning, it became an internal manifestation of an evolving morphology of the psyche. Under the sway of obsessive desire, I combined the words photograph and metamorphosis to signify the photomorphic process, without realizing that such a word already existed.
Salive, Copper and Moonlight
But, further research revealed that photomorphosis was no longer used by the scientific community to denote the organic process of light-induced metamorphosis and had been replaced by photomorphogenesis. Thus, by my investigation, I have given a new meaning to the abandoned word ‘photomorphosis’… by surrealizing it. To paraphrase André Breton: photomorphosis has been given to me to make surrealist use of it. The sustained investigation of the imagination is raised to the level of delirious curiosity, by the introduction of the activity of looking inward to discover, or in effect, to shed light on, the darker areas of the mind. To illuminate becomes a perfect analogy for the photomorphic process… The depths of the imagination open, the fields widen, things become visible… and metamorphosis is inevitable.
Alusofore’s Morning 2021
I drew pictures of strange animals as a kid, tried painting as a teen, and didn’t like the smell of the oils. I did nothing really, until about 19 years old after finding an anthology of French poets… That started my writing – loved surrealist poetry. Poets like Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Eluard. But mainly Andre Breton. He was the most interesting and inventive of them all really. Extremely magical. These days, or more recently, Rene Char (but mainly during his surrealist beginnings). I really like Jacques Dupin (who toyed with surrealism but became even more interested in the realm of language.) I am inspired mainly by Breton’s vantage point in the mind.
We have marvelous weapons
Having abandoned the copy machine at the end of 1999, I discovered that I could do the same thing on the computer and more, using Photoshop, in color, and with more tools…
Armed and Dangerous 2019
Most everything inspires my work. All of which are very much similar to collage. Both visual and textural. A deep synthesis between my writing and my visual works. How I work these days, well, it all stems from my own real-life experiences. However automatic and mostly strange, it’s not art, really, but a further investigation of the psyche… between the real and the imaginary.
The luminous bodies meeting for the first time…
Many years ago, I actually did hear and experience that voice of pure automatism. It startled me completely. I think, once you actually hear and listen to it, it opens a door a little, which stays open, and whenever I feel the urge to write or make imagery, it just comes out. It is believed that one is always dreaming, it’s just under the layer of normal perception of reality. One just stumbles upon it accidentally and feels an inkling, a glimmer of something out of that persistent dream. Like a Deja Vu experience.
Resolution of Pleasure 2019
There are vast differences today between the different countries and their systems of belief with regard to surrealism; not to mention the differences in approach between various groups of surrealism. All this eventually led to the founding of La Belle Inutile and the 6 or so people who had problems with modern surrealism, academia, social groups, etc. Problems to be solved.
written by J Karl Bogartte
The Wedding Guests Have Arrived Cover for Philip Lamantia’s book Becoming Visible
J. Karl Bogartte, born September 8, 1944, of Dutch and Irish descent, is both an artist and poet, schooled in anthropology, photography and various esoteric traditions. He has been an active participant in international surrealism for more than 50 years, and cofounder of La Belle Inutile Éditions. He presently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bogartte, is both an artist and poet, having published eight books of poetic writings: The Mirror held Up In Darkness, The Wolf House, Secret Games, Luminous Weapons, Primal Numbers, A Curious Night For A Double Eclipse, Auré, The Spindle’s Arc, and Antibodies: A Surrealist Novella. Long aligned with international surrealism, Bogartte is also a cofounder of La Belle Inutile Éditions. His work has appeared in the following anthologies: ANALOGON#65, Melpomene, Hydrolith #1 and #2, La vertèbre et le rossignol #4, Peculiar Mormyrid #2, Paraphilia, Silver Pinion and The Fiend online journal.
Mycelial Visions is a work that I have been maturing for months and that deals with the wonders and mysteries that the Fungi Kingdom contains, a name that is used to designate a group of eukaryotic organisms where fungi or mushrooms, molds and yeasts are found. This kingdom is one of the 5 great ones that make up others, such as animalia, plantae, protista or monera, having very own characteristics that distinguish it from these others due to its taxonomy and complex life cycles.
Specifically, the so-called mushrooms of the Psilocybe family caught my attention and their role as sacred psychotropics (hallucinogenic or neurotropic) in vast cultures, with records of this use, from the Paleolithic (Siberia, Sahara and Spain) to the present day. The power that these have to expand the mind and open unsuspected portals is well known, and that it has a certain analogy with what Eliphas Levi explained, regarding the 3 states to know the secrets of the universe, such as the embryonic state, dreams and delirium.
Thus, since the dawn of animism, these mushrooms have revealed, with the guidance of healers and shamans, that which is invisible and also ineffable, since those who experience these trips cannot express or relate what they have experienced on these trips to what is supposedly the depth of being and soul. These mushrooms usually occur in the dung of animals and it is plausible that prehistoric nomads followed herds not only for their meat but also to collect these mushrooms that were found growing in the feces of the herds. Among these mushrooms are the Psilocybe Mairei in North Africa, Psilocybe Cyanescens, present in Europe, America and Oceania, or Psilocybe Zapotecorum in Mesoamerica, to name three of the most recognized.
They are heterotrophic organisms, that is, they acquire their nutrients from abroad. Their form of reproduction is by spores and they have specific anatomical structures for their production, such as asci (contain ascospores) and basidia (with basidiospores). In fungi, reproduction can be asexual (without formation of a fruiting body) as well as sexual. Like the other kingdoms, they have different shapes, colors and sizes. Its habitat and location varies according to species, being able to grow in treetops or at the foot of it, as well as on rocks or soil, preferably where there is humidity and shade.
written by Enrique de Santiago. The art works are acrylic and ink on 300 gm Conqueror paper. Each painting and poem is a door.
FULLNESS A secret freedom opens through a crack that you can barely see. Rumi The morning and its ancient mystery with his new cycle embracing my vertebral calm with dawn light steep in aerial stays of a non-Euclidean flight and its fertile messaging that awakens the annelids to caress my future memory.
CONCILIATION There are times when all the accumulated anxiety and effort they rest in the infinite indolence and repose of nature. Henry David Thoreau I have heard the incessant whisper of the maitenes and felt its impetuous root that sings its light music mounted on the invisible verticality of design that escapes geometrically by the high pendulum cusp where I found the voice of the origin so I became a body in the bark adding myself to the essential channel that pulsates in the hollow where the bird flies with his outburst of winged love that awakens the astral eyelid and light the new dawn.
DOWN From the labyrinth of white meats where the filaments fractionate the divine eye the wise thread emerges from the molten magma before time.
DREAMS in the belly of the stone the dragon’s breath is hidden and in every cosmic cycle stir your energy that moves the suns and their destinies. You’ll know when the word goes on in that object that radiates silent voices by a demiurge who lost love in a vortex in that surprising weather.
HUGGING THE BELLY Diverse waters nest in the hidden embryonic embraces where the blade of time pick up the promise made to the stem in that sacred way. And I saw a new way and their metals hugged tightly the sign of the night dropping urgent shadows as field dams one upright and down in his immobility.
LIGHT The universe came down to my domain Opening the lights before precarious those who entered In the bones of my soul. Light of the hidden.
SEEING EYE the flesh of god opened the sky and my inner eye saw the route of the serpents.
HEAVENLY LANDSCAPES In the surroundings of the uranic gem the voices of the magicians are raised that bear ancestral flowers to heal the wounds of oblivion.
REVELATION There was his high imponderable crown on the distinguished and lukewarm verticality of the mystery without leaving a shadow in the mirror of the high magistracy of the verb pouring her violet love towards his moist horizon and restlessly embracing your silhouette that I don’t know That’s how I saw you behind the meanders of destiny in the sudden revelation of the morning birds Will you be the trail to be followed in unknown times? perhaps I will drink of your honey under the sign of the equinox coming As soon as you feel your eyelids full of the light of your redemption and rest the incandescent pearl that comes down from the dew this will be the floral beginning of the silent explosion like the one that leaves the pollen in the aerial possibilities while I await your coming. Someday they’ll die out under the rust the gears that bind us to reality.
DIRECTIONS My constellations that guide me pushing my mild matter in this immense sum of fiery spheres and finite inside the womb of mystery with its unsuspected breath of flowers because as above so below since nebulae have their own pistils and here I am with my steps apprehended waved and sacramented right and wrong taking up the path dictated by the stars smiling under high serene clouds looking for other paths that will bring a new hand to dream.
When I chose to fill my life with artistic creation… I was only an adolescent. I remember the moment. well, I was 14 years old and felt suddenly consumed by a desire, a need to draw… Since when I have been using all the artistic mediums within my reach: drawing, painting, embroidery, collage. A part of me remains with that adolescent eagerness to discover and create in an artistic sense.
While having attained a certain age, the desire – to live in a world of color and make artistic discoveries – is undiminished. Actually, it is probably even stronger than in my younger years. Following any period of doubt and inactivity I have always returned to my brushes and palette of colors, having a near constant need to express myself without using words.
However, in 2012 everything changed after a phone call from a doctor who told me that I was suffering from a neurodegenerative disease… After getting over the shock I sat myself down (in a wheel chair!) and threw myself into my work, which, as well as coloring my imagination, has since served as a comforting presence and safety valve for my frustrations.
My universe is dominated by color. Whether painting or embroidering, color is always as important as the subject itself. But how to speak more of one’s work? To what genre do I belong?
It has always been difficult for me to answer such questions. I would say that above all I am a figurative artist. But also, no doubt, part of the “outsider” movement.
Nature too has always inspired me. In discovering the artistic potential of embroidery, some subjects have become recurrent: mothers, black Madonna’s, mermaids, Little Red Riding Hood, Frida K.
As an illustrator I also make collages, using torn up pieces from old books, old photos, various fabrics and embroidery, and paintings… All these mediums are thus mixed to bring new life to those lives and faces long since forgotten.
My universe, year on year, is constantly renewed in an exploration of the world of childhood, color, drawings, textiles, embroidery, and painting. I work in the silence of forgotten faces and feelings… repairing and trying to retrieve them, sewing them into re-existence, reclaiming and bringing them back… with delicacy, gently, soaking them in color
Mitchell Pluto 