First, I begin these pieces with the definition of a center line and a central circle made with a round object of some sort (don’t want a compass poking holes in my canvases). From there, I basically do the geometry from what looks appealing to my eye rather than using a mess of straight lines and rulers which tend to muck the pieces up and as well give them an “I made this with a ruler” kind of look. I have tended towards making the straight lines a little more lively with just allowing myself to do the best that I can.
Two triangles balanced on top of each other. A central octagon, and then the details of the outer layers of the cuboctahedron. Next, I reinforce and bolster the lines with permanent marker (a pile of which I have managed to accumulate in the last years) some of which remains through and through the later layers of paint that are applied to the piece. Ah yes – the application of color comes flooding into a part of the piece. In this case the sky takes on a rich blue, interspersed with left empty lines radiating from the star tetrahedron.
The background takes form with the contrast of cloud and sky, and the details of light rays and poofy shadows interspersed in the waves of water vapor. This piece defied my satisfaction for some time, sitting under a lamp and reminding me every time that I looked over that the conversation had just begun and that we had more to talk about. Eventually, I started to outline the cuboctahedron, creating sort of a magnetic tremor spreading from the geometry. At some point the piece was done, or done enough, and I put it down for some time to enjoy its company. This all reminds me of Buckminster Fuller – how he said something to the extent of how beauty and aesthetics were what compelled him to know if what he had did was good. He said that if he arrived at something lacking in beauty, he knew that he had done something wrong / incorrect in his calculations and such.
The many hours of writing, painting, singing, bead-work, metal bending, web design, talking and editing, the crowdfunding campaign for my NYC Do School Fellowship has been released from my humming computer to the vast world of the wide web!
I am excited to post regularly during this month of crowdfunding with photos of the new paintings and artworks that I have made, samples of notes from past educational programs, a random video or song thrown into the mix, and some explanations for why I have chosen to focus on these certain offerings and styles.
Below and here you will find a link to the Indiegogo campaign, the links to the pages I have set up here onsite with a sampling of the artworks that I have made to exchange for your generous contributions, as well as some of the text from the campaign. Thank you kindly and please share it on your social networks and such!
Greetings! My name is Jo and I am from Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Two years ago I initiated work in South Africa to “upcycle” an old dumping site into the home of the Trash to Treasure Festivals. It is my passion to show people how they can use “trash” beneficially for the upliftment of their communities. I am also a passionate artist and am gladdened by the opportunity to make more art.
I recently was accepted to the Sustainable Cup Challenge Fellowship in New York City with The DO School. The main goal of the fellowship is to prepare and guide young entrepreneurs through the challenges of starting and sustaining a successful project in response to a pressing issue in their communities. I want to build upon the work that I have accomplished in South Africa and establish an eco-brick program in Santa Fe that addresses local plastic pollution.
Your contributions to this campaign will provide me with the support I need to participate in the NYC fellowship, to take my upcycling projects to the next level, and to produce a new series of artworks as well.
Yesterday dear friend Rob Woodford put the final touches on the video for my upcoming crowdfunding campaign which will go live in the next 24 hours or so and run through the month of February. The video features some awesome acted parts with friend Nicole Hogan, a song and rap that I composed for the project, and a bunch of the artworks that are on offer as campaign perks.
What is the campaign for you ask? A few months ago I was accepted to a fellowship in New York City with The DO School. Even though my flight and tuition is covered and housing subsidized, I need to raise some much needed money for living expenses and transport in the Big Apple.
The fellowship is designed to give young entrepreneurs like myselfthe tools and knowledge to implement and sustain projects such as those of Only Green Design with my brother James Stodgel and the Trash to Treasure Festivals in South Africa with friends like Candice Mostert and Nicola Vernon.
So the key concept within these writings is that we are a much larger being – Gaia – having a human experience. Because our internal worlds are so interconnected and interdependent with our external worlds, changes within one world correspond with changes within the other. Thus, the loss of biodiversity in our surroundings has corresponded with a loss of internal biodiversity. It is a well known fact now that by number there are more bacteria inside of our bodies than our own cells. As we have homogenized and drastically reduced the wealth and vast array of plants and animals on this planet, surely so too we have lost an internal biodiversity through the ingestion of fewer and fewer plant and animal foods and decimated internal bacterial populations through the heavy usage of antibiotics on a daily basis in medicine and regular doses fed to farm animals.
The population of certain humans has swelled in our exterior world, while the numbers of certain other peoples, animals and plants have dwindled and in all too many cases been completely exterminated. What could this correspond to within? Perhaps it is a loss of a wealth of all sorts of qualities and perspectives that we once possessed and had access to on some level. Perhaps it is a mining of health from our various organs for the sole benefit of the analytical brain. Perhaps it is a weakening of the internal beneficial flora and with that a prior held immunity and strength that has led to the current levels of sickness, disease and cancer that humanity is experiencing. Perhaps it is a hole being dug into a space where only the human voice can be heard; no longer the roar of lion, the flutter of hummingbird, the melodies of birdsong or the croaking of frog.
Let us look to a factory feedlot cattle operation. Fenced-in partitions stretch to the horizon, packed with no life save the fattened cattle with numbered plastic earrings. Soon they are headed for their sure demise, dismemberment and polite packaging on the fluorescent lit shelves of super markets. At an early age they horns are cut, and they are made to grow in the way that seems fitting for their human masters. If they have been granted the honor above others they have a tiny space to move in, and I imagine grow terribly bored with their situation. If they lie down, they choose to do so in the accumulated shit of their peers which can be smelled for miles in every direction. They live in fear of their masters until the day they die.
These beings turned to meat are then fed to and consumed by people as some of the cheapest, and in the cases of public schools, subsidized meals in the USA.1 We can certainly find the internal parallels in a great deal of the youth today. At an early age children are circumcised in one way or another, cut down so as to grow in a way that seems fitting for their masters. They too are packed into boxes where they are the only things living, are immunized and fed mixtures of antibiotics. Many become obese just like the cattle, grow terribly “bored” with their situations, and sadly live in fear until the day they die. To see those contributing to and laying in the accumulated shit of their peers one need only look at a modern day comment board on a popular video website or in response to a polarized article.
Could you imagine that this act of eating feedlot cattle is one of the major factors that will determine the future of humanity and life on Earth? “According to a 1996 report… 72 acres of rainforest are destroyed every minute, mostly by impoverished people working for multinational corporations, who are cutting and burning the forest to create agricultural or pasturelands to grow beef for the export to the United States.”2 Now, nearly 20 years later and with more than a billion people added to the surface of the Earth, do you suspect that the pace has slowed? Around 70% of rainforest deforestation is said to be the result of cattle farming.3 “The United States imports two hundred million pounds of beef every year from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama – while the average citizen in those countries eats less than the average American house cat.”4 The lungs of the planet are being destroyed, and with that the last remaining buffer to runaway climate chaos, to keep the Fugue States of American populace well fed with the confinement, laziness, boredom, obesity, fear and death also known as feedlot beef. Truly, what you are is what you eat. Please come back to life.
The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann, Three Rivers Press, 2004.
Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General quoted at http://evolvecampaigns.org.uk/evolve/environment.aspx Full quote: “70% of rainforest deforestation is the result of cattle farming. “We have all heard of the web of life. The way we live threatens to trap us all in a web of death.“
Diet for a New America by John Robbins, H.J. Kramer, 1987
We are tasked in this time of great change and transition to learn exactly who we are – interdependent beings that are only as strong and healthy as the life-forms and raw materials are that surround them. As we witness all around us and throughout the world the wholesale destruction and pillaging of the “natural capitol” of the planet – the once thriving and abundant biodiversity in places untouched by modern acts of human exploitation and extraction – we respond in a variety of ways to halt this process of self-immolation and suicide from actually terminally taking place. But at the same time we recognize that fighting against a system gone mad does a great deal to reinforce that madness, and makes the maniacs bent on filling their pockets because they can and have been taught to do so, come up with all sorts of new and innovative ways of wreaking havoc on their surroundings for the shortsighted benefit of “themselves”.
If these madmen, who are really just suffering from a spell of amnesia, were to have an experience of their interconnected nature, perhaps in the depths of a sweat-lodge or around an ayahuasca ingesting circle of initiates, then perhaps they would think twice before ransoming off their “humanity” and “gaianity” for the sake of stoking their bank accounts. When it comes down to it, it doesn’t take much for a human or another being to be happy and fit. All we need is a bit of food in our bellies, and a bit of wilderness to roam in, and the company and community of our friends and families. It really is quite simple… and yet we have been taught to believe that only through an endless grabbing for more and bigger toys can we be happy. This all arises from the initial dilemma from the lie that is taught – that we are irretrievably removed from each other and the natural world.
Just look at the act of breathing to have this lie revoked. The natural world floods into us with every in-breath, becoming us down to the cellular level. Then we exhale, a bit of ourselves and our cells entering into and becoming the natural world once more. We are locked into and forever bound in a dance of interdependence, whether we like it or not. Here and now we are challenged to let go of our infantile rebellion to the connection with everything that is, was and will be, and come back to the circle of life after the tantrum that we have been so extravagantly throwing. Yes please, it is time to come back to life now.
At some point the piece was done, or done enough, and I put it down for some time to enjoy its company. This all reminds me of Buckminster Fuller – how he said something to the extent of how beauty and aesthetics were what compelled him to know if what he had did was good. He said that if he arrived at something lacking in beauty, he knew that he had done something wrong / incorrect in his calculations and such.
LOVE TREE PRODUCTIONS 