Today I was reading about prehistoric art. An interesting book from Emmanuel Anati: "Aux origines de l'art". He studied prehistoric Art world wide and developped an interesting view point connecting diet, living conditions and the content of the art.
He discriminates between different types of societies. The hunter gatheres, are divided in the more early ones who didn't have a bow and arrow and later ones with those weapons, and then there are pasturalists who travel around with their cattle and agricultural groups. They all have different images in their art.
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But the description of one group gave me goose bumps. There are some socities who are mainly gatheres, living on a vegetarian diet in forest areas, luxuriant green environments with plenty of food, fruits and edible plants in abundance. Their lives are not dictated by economic necessities. Their natural environment is so abundant that they don't have to spend much time on collecting food, most of their time goes to singing, dancing, painting and dreaming. they make ellaborate stories and include a lot of "other-dimensional" beings. Beings who don't have a known physical form and that is what they paint. They don't paint that many animals but do paint plants and trees, and most of all they paint groups of human beings or semi human beings, mythological creatures in all kind of interactions.

Reading this description gave me goose bumps. I have been looking for that kind of a life all my life. That is what I would call HOME for me. That is how I feel I am and how my life should be lived. But where is my luxuriant forest and wehre is my tribe to sing together and share our dreamtimes?

Each individual flower is different. They are growing everywhere, thousands of them along the road, in the fields. they remind me of ice crystals or expanding stars systems, the expanding universe,  chinese firework at New-years eve. 

iFor a short trip I am back in France in the area where I have been painting for seven monthes in the winter of 2015/2016. With enthusiasm I have updated my knowledge of prehistoric times. With amusement I see how every possible detail is commercialised to get some more money out of the tourists and out of people like me with an interest in our ancient history and the first human art forms on this planet. I did buy some new books. 

We picked up some paintings which were still left over from my exhibition there.
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Home, my true home was for me always associated with a place where nature is wild and free. A place with not too many rules and no restrictions. A place where I can feel free, a place prestine and pure, whithout any pollution. For years I have been looking for such places. They are more and more difficult to find.
Yesterday I met two persons who both grew up in countries with a lot of wild nature and with quite some emotion they made clear to me that just nature was utterly boring for them and they so much prefer places with a lot of people and interactions, they love to be surrounded by an environment where everything has the imprint of human hands and human thinking.
For me that feels to small, too restricted.
The contrast was interesting. Clearly my search for harmony with nature and romantic dream of living in nature is influenced by the fact that it did not exist in the area where I grew up. May be people always just want something different and something unkown hoping to answer a fundamental human discomfort. What is unkown is supposed to solve everything. 
It keeps us moving that is sure.
And makes our choices and preferences utterly different.

In my imagination I try to keep that feeling of lighthearted joy alive. The ease to move with flexability and to live with entusiasm in regular states of extasy. That is the feeling the right environment would support and regenerate. I can associate it with different colour combinations and spheres. Lately I have been trying to paint them. It wasn't easy to really capture that. 

What if the paradise was never lost.
What if wars , inequality and environmental polution don't really exist.
What if that is just a distortion in our perception? Something like being so absorbed in a movie that you are watching that you forget everything else.

Denying the dark sides of life doesn't work, it is an active act by which you give it energy and strengthen it's presence. Trying to fix and find solutions is the same, you focus your attention on it and give it your energy and maintain it in that way.

We have to give all our energy to what we want to be true. Stop the movie we are watching and put something else on. Focus all our energy and attention on what is good, what is loving, what is beautiful and natural. That is what I have been trying to do for a couple of years now. But may be it is still a kind of fight.... I want to see and feel and live in paradise now wherever I go. I don't want to travel anymore to find some beautiful unspoilt clean natural places. I want to see that everywhere, beautiful natural places, cities with clean air and happy and friendly people. Lots of trees keeping the air clean and the people mentally healthy. Lots of flowers to rejoice in their beauty and feel good about life. 

Oil pastel on canvas 50 x 60 cm.

There is a silence and something very soft and delicate.
And there are the fine thin silvery greylines, like the threads of a cobweb in autumn, they connect everything, and they cluster together in life forms and they continu to exist after death, they are indicating the spirit world, conveying to my eyes what can't be seen. They move and wander but  they move as in a timeless dreamspace and that is the nature of that silence.
There are many layers of lines like intersecting universes, different worlds present at the same time. 

​Mixed media on canvas 60 x 80 cm.

Looking at the stones and feeling in my memory the nature as I did experience it in Iona this image came out. It is searching to get a more sharp focus on a world which is clearly there but not directly visible. A shimmering light of green tones full of life.