LIVICK'S DIARY FROM JANUARY 1, 2000 UP UNTIL FEBRUARY 12, 2008, HAS NOW BEEN ARCHIVED.

THIS IS A DIARY WHENEVER I HAVE THE TIME FOR IT, AS WELL IT SERVES AS MY LITTLE " SOAPBOX " AND ALL ROUND RANT PAGE.

"This online diary has not been edited regarding content, it is intended to be revealing and extremely candid".

August 18th, 2008

I am in the process of scanning about 1000 Kodachromes to build the next "Epitaph" Mural, I am just about one quarter of the way through that laborious scanning stage at this point.

In my mind the Summer Games which are happening now in Beijing China and covert biosphere destruction are literally one in the same thing. Let me explain my thinking on this.

I have been wondering if anybody has done a calculation on the massive carbon foot print that's being generated from holding the Summer or Winter Games for that matter? Think about the thousands of passenger carrying mega carbon off gassing jumbo jet flights, that have to travel half way around the world, just to deliver the many athletes and tens of thousands of spectators to those games. Not to mention the hundreds of cargo jet flights being used to move the boats, bicycles and equestrian event horses etc., over there just to compete.

There is also a massive amount of carbon being off gassed during the construction of new venues erected by every host city, concrete is incredibly carbon intensive while it's being prepared for use. What about that massive flame burning high above the stadium, off gassing carbon directly into the atmosphere with literally nothing to show for it, other than decoration and which burns needlessly for two weeks?

The bottom line truth is, the Summer and Winter games are incredibly destructive by adding an unnecessary amount of carbon into the planet's already fragile biosphere. It's indicative of complete unconcern by the organizing corporate entities regarding the future of the biosphere, including ironically humanity's own future, and the outlook for this planet's increasingly threatened wildlife.

Although I have been listening for them, I have heard not one single word, not one, on any broadcast anytime anywhere concerning these games, about what the organization is doing to try and mitigate the direct obvert threat to this planet's biosphere and it's organic inhabitants, that holding the these unsustainable games directly forces upon it.

I find it ironic that my government which is currently a "smaller government" conservative one, and so is reluctantly only half supporting our public broadcast network, the CBC, who bid a small fortune some years ago to now carry these games. Scattered as they are here and there amongst the endless hours of commercial advertisements. Two minutes of people running in circles in quite a bit of pain at the effort by the looks of things, then ten minutes of repetitive commercials, then two minutes of somebody swinging wildly and somersaulting on two parallel bars, then ten minutes of the same commercials then two minutes of people swimming furiously strangely not even enjoying their dip in the pool, and then back to commercials and on and on like this, literally all night long.

At the same time our "I could care less" centered government, through a lot of coughing and throat clearing is being forced by sheer public opinion to talk about "reducing" our countries massive planetary carbon footprint. It's literally speaking out of both sides of it's mouth, little wonder it's always choking and stumbling over it's words, because it's involved in both push and pull or suck and blow. No wonder our collective carbon footprint continues to grow massively with every year passing.

These corporately inspired games are one more very large nail being driven right into the biosphere and civilization's global warming coffin. All of it being done just to see who can run, row, bike or swim the fastest. Other than the athletes and those countries pushing their athletes to prove themselves the best, and the corporations trying to cash in on the perceived glory of the games, who else really cares about the results, besides the athlete's family and friends?

One might ask is it even fair that China with a gross planet destructive over population problem, is able to draw upon 50 times the population base of most other countries? Cherry picking and choosing among the best of it's athletes. Then ironically abusing it's hand picked athletes and training them daily to compete only in one skill, at the cost of providing them with a proper life sustaining education. A few make it to the top, but the rest, literally hundreds of thousands of hopefuls are simply pushed out the back door of the athletic school. When they are not good enough or pushed too hard and spent or injured and are certainly illiterate and uneducated in their late teens and early twenties, suddenly having to fend for themselves for the rest of their lives.

China the country is exactly like a two hundred and fifty foot giant winning a one mile race against a five foot high competitor, which is the size of most of other countries in the world when compared to China. In America's case it's fifty feet high in comparison to the China two hundred and fifty foot population base. Both are giants in population compared to Sweden, Denmark, Canada and most other countries. So both China and America have deep population bases and therefore much richer talent pools to draw upon. The law of mathematical averages dictates they should without question win the lion's share of the medals. Just as India tends to outpace the world with it's incredible mental abilities, because the pursuit of higher learning is more valued than merely playing sports is, and so what they are really good at. Why do you think so many of our professors are coming from India?

Now in my thinking would it not be far more important for the athletes involved, many of them are no doubt University educated graduates, to be spending their mortal energy thinking of ways to restructure and convert our civilization over to a cleaner Hydrogen way of life? Instead of merely trying to win meaningless track and field or swimming pool races to prove that you are a few milliseconds faster than other participants?

Apply that human energy of life into far more valuable worth while ideals, so we humans and the biosphere and all of it's wildlife might survive beyond 2100. Or possibly the energy could be spent on helping to stop the next now looming ice age, from quickly forming, as it most probably is now in the process of doing.

German scientists are now reporting that drilled core samples taken from lake bottom sediment indicates that the last ice age took just (1) one year to fully form and completely wipe out the local environment. Last winter here in Canada was one of the snowiest ever recorded. This Summer has been one of the coldest and rainiest we have ever seen. Last week I went grocery shopping, it was mid August and believe it or not the grocery store had the heat turned on, you felt it wash over you as you entered the store. Normally we are having warm 30C or 90F days and air-conditioning, but this morning it was only 10C or 50F when I got up, sure it will rise up to 21C or 72F by the afternoon they predict, but it really should be around 30C these mid August days.

Our weather patterns even now are highly unstable, as we all know from the wacky weather we are now living through. So there is gathering together the strong possibility that much of Europe and a good deal of North America might soon be written off, when the next ice age suddenly and unexpectedly forms, because our biosphere has been over saturated and is unable to cope with human induced carbon, that was not factored into the evolutionary equation.

And that ice age reality might happen during the next decade or possibly the one after that, or perhaps in the next half of this century, or possibly next year, especially the way things are speedily progressing on the carbon off gassing global warming front. The truth is there is a 50/50 chance that the North Pole might become ice free this Summer, for the first time in millions of years, scientists are anxiously waiting to see if it actually materializes, if not this year then the next or the one after that. Who knows that shocking fact just might be the critical tipping point that's required to induce the next ice age into commencing.

We are daily negatively affecting the planet's one and only life supporting biosphere, we are pushing it well beyond it's boundaries, even more so with our incredibly foolish quest of trying and find out who's the fastest person in various carbon intensive sporting endeavors. It is equivalent to organizing competitions and running races on the deck of the doomed ocean liner Titanic after it struck the fateful iceberg. Foolishly wasting time trying to find out who the fastest person among the passengers, as the ship carrying it's human cargo inevitably sinks lower into the cold dark ocean.

August 2nd, 2008

After three months of continually working on it, I have just posted the first of four Epitaph murals, the project I am currently working on. If you are interested this link will take you directly there...... Epitaph

July 19, 2008

I have just about finished the digital revision of my 1994 Mural 566, and it is amazingly greatly improved. The large scale mock up containing 896 half scale 3x4.5 inch images, looks stunning under the skylight on my studio wall.

I will live with it up for the next week just to make sure there are no more changes to be made, doubtless I might yet tweak an image or two here or there. My clue that its finally finished, is when I view it over several days and can see no obvious glaring visual hot spots that jump out and which require some attention.

The next step in a week or so will be to remove it from the wall image by image, working panel by panel, carefully removing eight images across and seven lines down which makes up one panel, eventually removing all 16 mock up panels of them. This being done basically to get at the numbers which are written on the backs of the numerous images.

Once I have those image numbers in hand, I can begin the computer assembly stage of the 16 panels. A small but important "peanut" gallery here in the studio, is campaigning hard for me not to blend all of the images together. Each image I am being told should stand on it's own merit, as a testament to the many hours involved in the image capture struggle that I went through in order too birth and bring this mural into visual life.

This particular aspect would make my work so much faster and easier, as no doubt having to blend all 896 images together would take a great deal of patience and a lot of computer time to accomplish. So the truth is I am at the crossroads of six of one and half a dozen of the other regarding blending, at this stage in the mural creation proceedings.

I most probably will not be blending them, which will greatly speed things up for me in the image creation process. That being the case my plan is to post it by mid August in a newly created section on the "Artwork" side of my website. Under a new heading that I am going to entitle "Epitaph". It is my visual tribute and the Epitaph for humanity, now that I am fully aware of the fateful negative reality that's directly ahead of us. With literally no hope remaining for human long term survival here on this planet, or in this cosmos.

July 1, 2008

I have finally finished scanning all of the 864 Kodachrome images from mural 566, phew what a nightmare of a job! I have even managed to print out an 84"x144" large scale mock up image, the many sections of which are now taped up on my studio wall. It was a lot of time consuming boring work which took me every day of the last month to accomplish.

I will now happily spend the Summer months of July and August working on this piece virtually every day. It will be taxing for me to say the least. Juggling close to 900 images trying to improve on the mural's image, it should be challenging as well as being down right visually stimulating.

May 28, 2008

If anybody is interested, it actually took me just a week to come up with 30 of this style of imagery, however they have only been made to 40"x60" scale, making them up as full scale murals would have taken me much longer. I have just posted 12 of the 30, this link will take you directly there... "Synergy"

So I have decided to return back to scanning all of the 864 Kodachrome ISO 25 images from my 1994 Mural 566, which should take me about 6 weeks and possibly more to finally complete the scanning stage. Then about a month or two to make up a large scale mock up 84"x144" inches and attempt to creatively rework it. Then another month or possibly two to computer assemble the 16 42"x72" panels.

Naturally there will be the time consuming smoothing out and blending everything together, that is if I decide to go with the fully smoothed out route on all 896 images. I have been considering not blending them at all but simply leaving the images all combined together, with each standing on it's own as taken. The final scale of this digitally reworked mural will be 14x24 ft or 4.2x7.2 meters.

May 18, 2008

This piece has worked itself into a longer ramble, I do appear to be at a crossroads at this time, deciding on exactly what to do next. I am in a quandary of whether to carry on and try to complete what my February 27th, 2008 post alluded too (please look for this post further below). I began scanning the close to 900 Kodachromes in a bid to digitally redo thus trying to improve on my 1994 mural 566. I actually managed to do several weeks worth, just shy of one quarter of the scanning involved.

Then as often occurs during mundane periods an idea took root during the tedium of scanning, so I got side tracked and launched off onto other projects. Interesting ideas which sprang to mind and became much more creatively engaging for me, rather than spending two months of seemingly dead time involved with a mountain of 35mm digital scanning. At some point I do intend to return to Mural 566 and complete it, perhaps it would be good as an over the Summer project, seems to me like it still might be a worth while project to spend my time on, especially during those lazy hazy days of Summer. That is if there are any lazy hazy days of Summer left to be had, the weather these days is turning out to be more frightening and ominous than Summer like.

However the truth is, just as I was about to return and settle back into the boring scanning mode, I woke up this morning with striking visions of visual "infinity" running around my mind. It was as if a veil was drawn back for me and I could "see" just like a voyeur excitedly peering in at human nakedness, indeed seeing all of the freckles and warts that are found entangled in organic life. However this vision I had was more about seeing into the bubbling cauldron of artistic creation, or so it seemed to me, I find it amazing how you can delude and convince yourself of just about anything in life. Like the war crime defence of "I was just following orders". These newly imagined images would be a great departure for me visually speaking, they would be more daringly photographically abstract than anything I have done before.

I have tried to take this path several times before, but I was always thwarted by repetitive looking photographic "wallpaper" like imagery that resulted in my youthful fumbling visual attempts, so I quickly returned to the much safer roots of subject and object driven imagery. Having something that's easily recognizable as part of the imagery, is a much more secure path. Especially when you have something easily definable in your imagery that someone viewing can grasp onto and easily relate to. The viewer can always connect to imagery that strikes a chord and makes perfect sense to them, and which operates at the level of common human understanding.

This shared relationship in viewing our world is what drives most of our present day photojournalist and straight forward documentary styles of photographic imagery, but unfortunately reduces it's visual level to one of repetitious photo journalistic hackneyed banality. The same old, same old, photocopy visual "anchor" at work, a syndrome where true visual progress in the photographic medium is being limited to external intellectualized conception, thoughts and ideas about our world and the overall human condition that are simply being applied to a pedestrian point and shoot photojournalistic photocopy style of work.

Creativity in traditional photography is not happening through any pure visually enlightened headway that's being made by an expanding and creative vision, but simply by photographically depicting points of view on rather straight forward subjects, then using processing image tweaks instead of innovative visual refinements to move the work forward. Enhanced image resolution thus sharper looking images and more intense colours, or richer more intense black and white prints, technological processing improvements which is something that the public can more easily relate to.

I am thinking of making a collection of mural imagery something like this work below, all printed out in sectioned 40"x60" panels, enough of course to make up large scale murals. This type of photographic abstraction that I am considering exploring, was made by scanning and then reconstituting an old 8"x10" transparency that I took in 1979 of a newly green Spring bush no less, so it's just one transparency image.

I might also consider creating the murals using a number of different images that are brought together to form interesting visual abstractions. Possibly involving a number of different contrasting images that are printed out as 40"x60" panels and could exist quite independently as fully finished works themselves. Or conceivably they might all come together to make up a given mural's final creation. I'll have to see what avenues this photographic approach to vision eventually takes me or not. As the old saying goes "the sky's the limit" or perhaps there IS actually a limit to the sky above us, but we really should have known that.

Of course the big departure comes in not actually dealing with any main formal subject matter, all photography including much of my own, it seems to me, is being guided and even covertly manipulated by it's own mechanical photocopy style of creation. That of being object and subject driven by simple camera photocopy technology, an approach that I find is rather boring and creatively stifling, at least it is to me, and in some ways extremely visually limited to a myopic single lens point of view. That's especially so if you are genuinely creatively artistically inspired, and thus driven by your inner demons to probe and push the well known straight forward visual envelope, more so than being mere photo equipment point and shoot based, yielding incredibly sharp but sadly mundane "seen it before" image inspiration.

Almost all of photography works like this, the photographer exists as a self important well traveled point and shoot "photocopy" practitioner. Indeed partaking in very long journeys around the world, visiting far flung locations to hunt out and find the exact kind and type of imagery that suddenly twigs something in their imagination. Perhaps they simply hunt for subject matter that fills a required portfolio need, something which says to them this is a good image, in the context of the ongoing portfolio, let's add it to the bag. I know because I worked exactly this way for many years in my close to fifty year long photographic journey.

The twigging itself is usually derived from what photographers have seen somewhere sometime in books magazines or online these days, in the ubiquitous work being done by many other photographers. My own inspiration for working Indian themes came unexpectedly in the mail in 1982 as a lowly travel flyer no less, the headline said there were fifty thousand religious festivals each year in India. And that tid bit of information hooked me into investigating the issue more thoroughly and visiting my local Indian consulate to seek out information. Unexpectedly ten years of my life were consumed by a longing and passion to work in India. In fact my entire outlook on life was also very greatly affected by that immense and overpowering experience. India became my mistress and literally changed my cloistered Western based outlook on life and the cosmos.

The truth is this however, I both loved and hated my Indian experience equally with an intense passion, I think because it got under my skin like any relationship does and thus affected my views of this earthly reality. I love working there but hated all the incredible troubles and hardships one had to go through to actually do so successfully. The first few trips we became deathly ill just from drinking the water, although we were very careful about what we allowed past our lips, we found out even expensive Indian bottled water was not safe and caused us problems, we even tried boiling it but somehow we always became quite deathly ill. Until that is, we got smart and purchased an expensive ceramic style Swiss made water filter and carefully filtered all of the water we consumed. That water filter literally saved our lives. I have lots of stories about all the mayhem and at times the numerous troubles we ran into, I really should write them down one day in book form, and no doubt I will, but not today.

Now I also feel that the mechanistic style in traditional point and shoot style of "art" photography I see these days, has been severely limited and is stunted in pure visual growth. With the emphasis in this case being placed mainly on improving the photographic process more that the vision. Photography has it's own commercially minded mass appeal and indeed it's ease of application by anyone who happens to be holding a camera, including children these days and also invites legions of equipment followers. With the rampant easy photocopy approach that's tied tightly to the medium, and of course it's incredible commercial over use, but the truth is photography as we know it is still not progressing visually like it should be. I feel that it has a "you have been used" mark left on the world's image capture process. Photography the medium itself, is being commercially used like a back ally whore who is willing to do anything for drug money, and no doubt is destined to be tarnished and tainted for the rest of its life.

This commercial reality has controlled and affected photography so much that it actually dominates and gravely limits the overall scope and the end direction of the medium itself. It is left up to those lone wolf visionaries who are far out ahead of the pack, blazing a visual path for the pack's cloistered mentality to eventually follow, naturally given time and hopefully through a growing visual literacy occurring in the public sphere. But will vision literacy even have time to develop in the general population, before a global warming climate meltdown brings about an end to this current civilization as we know it?

Even our supposed museum grade high "art" photography has been sorely tainted and has been and is in my mind quite creatively stunted, limited to visual mediocrity through being sideswiped in the over arching swath of the commercially minded "point and shoot" brush. Mediocre creativity constantly parades itself as quality "photographic art" in our urban photo galleries. It's accompanied by the intellectual bluster coming from of a legion of essentially sightless photographic creative fakers. All trying to bolster justify and shore up what is basically an unshoreable middling "point and shoot" mode, of externalized mechanically based artistically core detached, photo industry realized pseudo creativity.

Many photographers even the supposed "fine art" based ones can be found working in the commercially minded tradition, simply creating a "stage" (set) that displays things, objects to skillfully light and photograph. Or they go traveling on location and work exactly like any run of the mill commercial photographer would do in their thinking and approach to the subject. Good commercial photographers are literally a dime a dozen, photographic artists doing museum grade work should really try and rise above their ubiquitous run of the mill commercial brothers and sisters.

Photographers of all ilk point fuss and fiddle with their lighting, or tripod and then play with their camera's settings, if they are insecure in their technical abilities they will do numerous instant look see Polaroid's while on location, then at the moment of mental satisfaction when looking through their viewfinder and its being confirmed by the Polaroid's, that everything more or less looks OK, they simply click the shutter. In all of my travels using 8"x10" 5"x7" 4"x5" and 6x7 formats, I never once took any through camera Polaroid's. However I will admit that I used them extensively while working commercially in advertising and in the beginning of my photographic journey while doing industrial photography, endless Polaroids taken mainly for the art directors or clients quick look see, back in the mid and late 1960s.

The rest of the routine photographic path lays in print production, and in many cases this important part of the photographic path was simply being farmed out to old fashion wet labs, or mainly these days to computer terminals caging skilled people who specialize in working with digital files, and who produce work for anybody including those shallow insincere "celebrity" mode of photographers. Those individuals who are reasonably successful in other life ventures and suddenly adopt photography as their "hobby", but through driving egotistical ambition always seem to end up with museum exhibitions to their credit. Over the years I have seen a number of people exactly like this with the funds to support large touring Museum exhibitions.

Being "celebrities" in other fields naturally easily seems to open doors in the photographic field, but strangely that's not the case in the more serious art field. Celebrity status affords one a certain cache in photography as it does in the fashion world, museums and commercial galleries desiring to cash in on the artificially created "celebrity status" of such an "artist", in fact do so just to insure the public's attention and attendance. So the viewer is treated to a simple basic level of photographic art, the equivalent to being read a grade school reader, (see Dick run up the hill, kind of thing ) and believing what they are hearing is indeed great literature.

The public does not know the difference, the curators irrespective of motivations are merely trying to fill the gallery through the use of the celebrity draw bringing in as many patrons as possible, presumably to justify their existence. As a result photography continues being practiced and exposed to the public at an extremely base level of point and shoot visual skill. Something which is reinforced and bolstered by a presumed to be highly reputable museum system, but it's a system that works guardedly more on societal connections than displaying genuine talent. As a result the medium of photography is continually being held back from achieving true artistic credibility and full artistic equivalency. Remaining second best as envisaged by the main museum system to be little more than the "point and shoot" visual scribe of civilization. The little photocopy tool that virtually anybody these days who wants to, can make use of and even expand through connective networking into major museum exhibitions.

This often results in images that have been merely mechanically photocopied and then chemically processed into existence, which tends to exclude any genuine artistic human creation of art being present during the making. I suppose because it's the known and accepted tradition of the medium, dating from a time when photography was more about the craft and process of making an image, than it was about any thing else. And that notion regarding photography is deeply ingrained in the public's consciousness.

The skill involved in laboriously taking pictures and then the sheer technical know how of chemically making prints, was how it all began. In some sense the image making process of photography has become incredibly industrialized, thus striping it of any genuine artistic merit. The type of work we see is being produced by it's industrialization rather than it's truly creative practitioners, and is deemed by like minded photographic thinking to be mechanistically resolved photographic art. Even if in the artistic context it's not truly creative nor as artistically mature or anywhere near as highly developed as serious visual photographic art might possibly attain.

Sure there are many successful "artists", who are not really genuine "visionaries" or even true artists for that matter who are simply raping photography because of it's ease of use, or they are simply using it like the whore its now known to be, mainly because of its ability to fraternize with just about anybody.

However these exploiters are all using photography in the basic point and shoot kindergarten manner, like it first evolved in the beginning. Carefully arranging commercial or movie like set ups in front of the camera, or simply photographing the world right in front of them, by simply pointing the camera and clicking the image. Then having large commercially based photographic labs print out the work very large scale, possibly to use in large mall like commercial back lit displays, or as very large commercially made prints. Impressive in any museum setting no doubt, making them great heroes in the less creatively demanding artistic community, but incredibly shallow and insincere from a genuinely creative and potential photographic perspective.

In pushing the known boundaries of photographic vision, what I am attempting to do is blend "mechanically based photography" with "creative hand eye and mind art" by trying to seamlessly stitch them together. Creatively uniting and manifesting both factions of photographic image making into one unique creative wholeness.

May 17, 2008

I have been spending all of my time lately sprucing up, if that's the right saying to use, my "Cosmic Wail" section as it seemed to be in need of more thought and care than I originally gave it.

Here is a direct link over to that gallery if you are interested "Cosmic Wail"

May 5 , 2008

I have posted my new "Symbiotica" mural page here is a link over to that page "Symbiotica"

APRIL 30, 2008

I have been obsessed lately, working on the new "Remnants" series, it's going reasonably well, eventually I intend to do twenty four (give or take) of these murals. Although perhaps not all of them as the "Remnants" series. I have another series which is also on the go at the moment that I am thinking of titling my "Symbiotica" series. They are all under the umbrella of my digital "cave paintings" at least that's how I like to think of them.

All of my time has been taken up working on this new series, so much so that I find it hard to fall asleep at night and often get up at 4 or 5 AM and begin working all over again. Nice that after close to fifty years of nothing but photography every single day of my life, the creative imagery juices are still flowing for me, too bad that my libido juices weren't just as active, they seem to have evaporated. By the way I began taking photographs as a child, in fact I grabbed and held onto a camera and just wouldn't let go when I was just fifteen months old, this according to my mother, she had taken me to a friends house for a portrait sitting. I began taking photographs with a Kodak box brownie as a child. I knew that I wanted to be a photographer well before puberty as if it were somehow "preordained". Or perhaps it's just my personal crutch to get through life. Something to hold onto and fall back into when the stuff of life does not seem to be worthwhile anymore.

Not quite sure what the driving compulsion is, perhaps it is just a way of simply filling in time while waiting for the inevitable to play out. As I have been "slaving away" on these murals I have come to a kind of personal resolution on the Global Warming conundrum that we all face. I honestly believe that we have literally had it as a planetary civilization, metaphorically the great ship of human civilization has run head on into it's fatal carbon dioxide iceberg. The only thing left for us now are scrambling feeble inadequate attempts at adaptation and of course an impending mass die off of organic life. Stopping the burning of all fossil fuels as a way of potentially mitigating the biosphere's impending collapse and eventual demise, is something this planet's "intelligent" civilization will not, and in truth I believe simply can not do.

I am now looking at it through the lens of long term evolutionary protocols, the planet will over billions of years bring many humanoid like civilizations to evolutionary fruition. It will keep on trying time after time until it gets it right. One day it will eventually manifest an intelligent civilization of aware sentient life that quickly clues in and gets it. This civilization know how to live indefinitely through working symbiotically completely intune with the planet's overiding organically motivated protocols. It's just not our present civilization, we are already doomed to the rubbish heap of ongoing evolution by our willfully greedy incompetence. The planet being as old as it is takes ten thousand years to simply blink it's eyes, we humans will have come and gone within the blink of a planetary eye.

So I am personally accepting the impending fatal reality as a fact soon to materialize. It's kind of like finding yourself standing on the deck of the ocean liner Titanic only minutes after it came into collision with that fateful iceberg. Thereby dooming the ship and many of it's passengers to their watery graves. As everybody, at least those who were still awake and roaming around the decks at the time it happened, scurried about all excited by the event that just occurred. Some even picking up and marveling at the the broken shards of ice laying around the deck, you and possibly a hand full of the crew quickly realize the terminal fate that awaits the passengers and that it is only an hour or two away.

Most on board would have thought you were crazy at the time to even suggest the large ship was going to sink and do so within a few hours. It was after all said to be virtually unsinkable by the builders who had never imagined such a side swiping rivet popping collision. I truly believe that we are all in the exact same position right now, as those sad Titanic passengers were in 1912. We, our civilization on this planet, have plowed into a formidable carbon dioxide "iceberg", our life supporting biosphere is now showing signs of wobbling unsteadily as a precursor to eventually faltering then ultimately failing, and that's going to happen much sooner than anybody realizes.

The hard drinking cigar smoking gamblers in the ship's grand state room, continued on with their game of poker, ignorantly ignoring the fast approaching dooming reality. Just like as our modern day radio announcers, those snake oil right wing hucksters dominating the commercially minded air waves of AM talk radio, who these days belittle and continually mock any and everything to do with global warming. Lying and deceiving their audience, telling them the exact opposite of the honest truth. Endlessly denying to their listeners that any problem exists, just to maintain the mercantile status quo. Like pide piper's they will foolishly spiel their naive gullible followers right over the Global Warming cliff edge.

The hour or two the Titanic's passengers had to live after the fateful collision, becomes fifty, one hundred even two hundred years left for human civilization. Our biosphere will eventually completely collapse, just as the Titanic eventually slipped beneath the surface leaving everybody trying and save themselves, fighting and scrambling just to survive a little while longer.

Sure one third of the passengers took to life boats and managed to survived the Titanic incident, perhaps if we are incredibly and profoundly lucky one third of humanity might hold on and survive the coming biosphere chaos and cascading collapse. But at today's present population base that means over four thousand million of the human population most probably will not.

It is easy to see, for anybody who cares to face the naked reality, that the biosphere collapse is already underway and in full progress. Sure it might take five ten or fifteen more pollution prone decades to become a fully formed destructive beast. This minuscule time frame is more or less instantaneous in the fourteen billion year life of this planet. Nothing it seems, at least as far as I can make out, is going to stop this reality from playing out.

It's funny to think like this, most people I know actually think it's all just a grand socialist hoax, no doubt from listening to all those commercial AM radio hucksters who spend all of their time denying the truth. They also feel it's just another way to get more money out of the population in the form of carbon taxes. So I seem to be in the tiny minority among my fellow citizens, the few of us who have actually thought to educated themselves on the global warming topic, once you do you will also come to know that we are all doomed because nobody is taking this reality seriously.

If you think that I am over the top and possibly exaggerating things a little, I have one very important thing on my side...TIME. In twenty to thirty more years as the ship of civilization slips much faster and deeper into the turbulent waters of impending climate chaos, I am willing to wager that you might not think so then.

After all of my admitted pessimism, it's hard not to be because is appears that nothing much is changing to honestly address this fatal issue. What little insignificant changes we the aware public are trying to make, are in truth, much too little much too late to even matter in the greater Global Warming context.

If you would still like to see the first in a series of my photographic "cave paintings" this link will take you there.

MARCH 24, 2008

I have a long last completed my "A Cosmic Fatality" essay, only now its being called "Collective Revelation".

If you are interested, here is a direct link over to the latest essay "Collective Revelation"

FEBRUARY 28, 2008

If anybody is interested I just posted six of my "Insight" murals. There are seventeen in this series so far.

Here is a link over to that page.... InSight

FEBRUARY 27, 2008

A few day ago I began working on a rather large and time consuming project, it's most probably going to take four to five months to complete just this one mural. I begun scanning all of the 35mm images, there are 864 Kodachromes making up this particular mural. A big hug and kiss to those little geniuses who invented Digital ICE an amazing dust removal scanning technology.

The mural is being divided up into sixteen 42x72 inch panels, and each panel will contain 56 6x9 inch 35mm images that will be very carefully blended together. The final overall scale of the mural will be 14x24 ft or 4.2 x 7.2 meters. Without giving myself any pressure I can manage scanning and tweaking one of the sixteen panels per week give or take. It's time consuming scanning the images, not as a batch scan but doing them one by one, because the 35mm holders used for batch scanning crop into the image far too much for my liking. Then spending time in Photoshop tweaking, leveling out exposures and carefully matching colour image to image.

However here is where things get delightfully interesting for me. I am going to be reducing those 864 individual 6"x9" images down to 3"x4.5" inches each in scale and print them out on Enhanced Matte proof paper to make up a 7x12 ft large scale mockup on my studio wall.

Before the final sixteen panel computer assembly takes place, and all of the time consuming weeks on end of blending that's going to be done on each of the sixteen panels, I intend to spend up to a month give or take "playing" with the images first, just to see if I can improve on the original straight photographing.

I have grown and learned a lot regarding mural construction and image placement since this image was first taken in 1994, and I feel there is definitely room for some improvement here. These images were captured in Calcutta India, and what you see here is exactly how it was taken over quite a few hours, using a Nikon F4 and Kodachrome 25 ASA film. Digital photography was only in it's very early infancy at that time, film was still King of the hill, and Kodachrome 25 was King of the film hill, especially if you could pick and choose your film batch, which I did with great effort and with Kodak's kind help.

My driving motivation for doing this mural is this, in my mind I intend it to represent that judgement coming from the cosmic conscience. The mud and straw was taken from a deemed to be "holy" earthly river coming to life through the hands of sentience on this planet, to bring forth it's final judgement on our civilization.