WINTER SOLSTICE 2014

Another turn of the season and another turn around the sun concludes. It is with gratitude that I can say it has been a most pleasant, peaceful year. With just a short trip to the mainland to visit family I have gone through all the seasons here in Honolulu and feel very much at home. I am looking forward to the new year, new art, and new friendships.

My major accomplishment this year was completing my "autobiography" in the form of an artists book. A one of a kind gathering of what is "me" that I have been working on for four or five years. Here is a description and text to go along with the photos:

Cover - 11" x 15" metalic silver board with Tibetian Buddhist prayer down both sides; a yin/yang symbol in the center with a quote from a Bob Dylan song - "she's got everything she needs, she's an artist she don't look back." Also the words: synchronicity, serendipity, coincidence, and what if? are interlaced.

Lifting the cover shows a spirial of words, thoughts, rememberances, major and minor occasions starting around the word "Oconomowoc" the town where I was born in Wisconsin, USA. Each corner of the top margin of the page has the infamous black ships of Commodor Perry with Japanese script taken from the box of a gift cake, and "what if?" repeated in the center. When you lift the bottom half of the spirial you find three shadow self portraits and another yin/yang simbol with automatic writing on the right half and the text "a tangle of circumstances brought me here."

When you 'pull down' as directed two more pages open showing double image of me swimming at Lanikai Beach. In the center is a "double happy" stamp. The photo was taken by my friend the photographer Debra Casey. This is bordered by a couple more of my shadow self portraits, topped by my haiku:

a long series of
what if and why not brings me
to this paradise

And below the photo is Edna St. Vincent Millay's
Second Fig

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

The page below has outline map of the eight islands of Hawai'i.

And when you flip up those pages I've put three infinity signs; my haiku:

what if
the endless
possibilities
can be explored
forever -

And my final thought "saving the best for last"

But then I came across this quote by John von Neuman just a couple of weeks ago and had to add it as it really spoke to me.
"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple,
it is because they do not realize how complicated life is."

Signed and dated December, 2014
[But I reserve the right to continue adding to it.]