Showing posts with label jade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jade. Show all posts

Wednesday, 1 February 2017

TCS/VanillaManila



1. "Vanilla and Manilla"
(cream and tan)

Corrugated card and grades of parchment,
printer paper white to watercolour weight for pen and ink,
photocopy powder to sumi-e.

Burlap (Hessian), Hemp, Linen, Cotton, Silk:
increasing refinements of texture,
grades of fabric based on the production expense. 

These are colour schemes, texture themes. 



Originally I associated V&M aesthetic with old whitewashed art studio's I grew up in and canvas textures, along with brown envelopes and parcel packaging used to wrap them and the cultural lifestyle of having a snail-mail system.

As I grew up and discovered sexuality and sexual hygiene, fluffy white kittens and experienced cougars. There is a scene with 'the white fox' in American Graffiti, cult coming of age in 1950s movie which associates V&M with (the non 'vampiric black & red cabaret' half of) burlesque and thus the burlesque side of Steampunk: suede and fur where it blends with purity and light hearted teasing. Innocence meets fond nostalgia of accumulated experience to create flirtatious faux-naivety and the promiscuous hope of more yet to come.

These themes are difficult to ascertain with precision hence the colour and texture doing the talking for itself, abstract expressionism of synaesthetic delight where representational imagery would be too graphic, too obvious for the delicate sensitivities. Snow melts in sunlight. A symbolic worship of fertility, life, longevity in the form of the gift of cum. Respect of and worship of Men by the white tiger society. Skin soft as jade, chemical free, organic and natural, wholesome.

Recently I have been hugely inspired by Tales of Kausao City rpg by Ryan M. Danks which has given me a chance to develop the "Vanilla and Manila" theme, largely through 3D architectural design although it is not the design but the colour scheme which holds it all together.

Protected by sandstone and wood there will be cream and brown leather seats, furs and skins of the same colours for her soft feminine comforts as she sits in a cafe watching men, drinking coffee and cream, perhaps with a small hint of spices and brandy, the honey.




"too good not to steal"
possibly the best chat up line ever


It's that colour scheme - brown, sand and tan. From the "Vanilla and Manila" idiom (where things ain't quite so black and white). I love how Kausao City is sepia, yellow, aged and faded, bleach bone and stale, grime encrusted, yellowed with age like uncared for caffeine dyed teeth and smokers lungs, stained city, polluted and literally jaded with experience. 


And then there is Jade itself, no yellow Jade but blue, green, red, black, white, colourful against the monotony of a smoggy sky and dirty waters, sandstone sky-rise glories of corporate traditional design. The purity here is the aspirations of the living, something the characters bring to the forefront of the story.


Ancestry, ritual, tradition, lived for the first time: every time. 



Saturday, 1 June 2013

Jade Cat ヒスイ 子猫

Disclaimer:

This blog contains photoshop montages using bits of illustrations made by other people as well as my own scans from nature. Wherever possible the original artist has been accredited. In no way do I intend copyright infringement. There is a tradition within Japanese print  whereby multiple artists may work on a piece and add to it their mark, sometimes a generation after the original artist had set it aside. All art is progressive.

As a forest is worth more than the sum of all its trees, so the whole contains greater than its component parts. Refer to issue of Monsanto Corporation statement on public record; “in future if you want to eat you will have to buy our products”; patenting genes as major contemporary ethical debate. Monsanto products are banned throughout Europe because they contaminate organic food crops with their patented genetically modified genome that kills rats in independent lab tests and probably does the same to you if you eat it too.

There are several elements to this blog. They interrelate.




The first element is a batch of photos selected from an afternoons walk on one of the few sunny days we get in Wales.

A Taoist medicine journey, following the Way; instinct, which took me to and through a patch of common land overgrown by a mixture of indigenous and invasive plant species.

 

虎杖, イタドリ                itadori

The second element is a particular invasive plant species, its pro’s and cons. The plant is Fallopia Japonica, Japanese Knotweed. 

"The kanji expression is from the Chinese Hǔzhàng 虎杖  meaning "tiger staff", but as to the Japanese appellation, one straightforward interpretation is that it comes from "remove pain" (alluding to its painkilling use)."

First introduced into the UK in the early 19th century for the Royal Botanical Gardens exhibition, it has since spread all over the country.

"It is listed by the World Conservation Union as one of the world's 100 worst invasive species. The invasive root system and strong growth can damage concrete foundations, buildings, flood defences, roads, paving, retaining walls and architectural sites. It can also reduce the capacity of channels in flood defences to carry water."

"In the UK, it is an offence under section 14(2) of the  Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 to "plant or otherwise cause to grow in the wild" any plant listed in Schedule nine, Part II to the Act, which includes Japanese knotweed. By 2010 over £150m was spent annually on Japanese knotweed control, and a decision was taken on 9 March 2010 in the UK to release into the wild a Japanese psyllid insect, Aphalara itadori."



Several years ago I began my own study with japanese knotweed.

The plant has a strong spirit, a powerful presence that is easy to attune to.

Sitting amidst a patch of it meditating is one of the most chilled out experiences available in UK. There is a quality in the green, vitality.

Reading it shamanically, symbolically; arrow-heart shaped leafs suggest it to be tonic for the blood system. I removed non-propogating elements from the plant (leaf and stem) and boiled them like rhubarb before ingesting. It tastes mildly bitter and had no apparent effect on me.








My internet research revealed that 'tiger staff' soaks up radiation. I assume this to mean both electronic radiation and nuclear contamination. I don't know if eating it makes you immune or increases the amount of radiation in your system. A year after Fukishima, the worlds worst nuclear accident so far, this is all beginning to connect up and make sense; nature is holistic and there is a reason this plant is here. For several decades Wales has the worlds highest number of cancer incidents, presumably due to fallout from American nuclear testing crossing the Atlantic on the top-winds.

The third element of this blog is information from Nexus magazine Vol20 no4 June-July 2013, which arrived the very same day, and relates.   

























I had been working hard for several days without a break.I needed to get out of the house and detach my brain from computer and associated electromagnetic smog.

Feeling fried from too much disruption by unwanted attention of neighbours and radiation from machines, I desperately needed to recharge.

A lesson to be applied as the fourth element of this blog, the project at hand, namely art and music for forthcoming storyteller game entitled tRust for Ordo Octopia Ltd, see their website for more information at www.globalcreole.co.uk


I assembled the following experimental montage illustrations as focus-prep for what the jungle ravines amidst fragmented urban layers of tEra, the world of tRust, might look like. On tEra there is a phrase intended to work on several levels of meaning;

“life in the cracks”

The landscape of tEra is a giant orgonite honeycomb hive where miles high of expanding-foam sprayon orgonite; resin walls containing crystalline particles that operate as a computer matrix, a web of light-refractive touch-op holocom, operates as solar panel and global communications database; has fractured due to the unexpected event of the world swelling up in a series of earthquakes lasting several weeks.

Organic plant life exists in the jungle canyons formed by the fragmentation of the hive. Long slender green columns amidst a cyber darkness of the urban wilderness reminds me of a sword called Jade Dragon in the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It requires a master to wield this blade. In today's modern world it hangs in a museum.


manga from: A Dream In Garden by Xia Da   www.summerzoo.com
print from: charity shop, lucky find, signature illegible.
lettering from: googletranslate ("dream now garden butterfly change").


upper manga comic strip (extract) from: Cat's Paw by Damian Slater
manga sword from: CrouchingTiger HiddenDragon 4 by Wang Du Lu and Andy Seto
lower manga comic strip (extract) from: Last Shadows Cast by Casper Wijngaard
sword colour adapted screenshot from: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon movie




art for tRust: chalk graffiti glyphs on weathered cytex walls


introducing Selene
While contemplating an appropriate name for this blog I made an interesting discovery thanks to google translate;  

ヒスイ


Japanese spelling for Jade looks like  English spelling for CAT !