BEGINS The thinking and making of the art by Garret Moore

 

Begins

"Begins a Star, Begins a World"

The Thinking and Making of the Art by Garret Moore

It was always hard to find the right model for a painting, but usually, I let the world run my muse over the cliff of discovery, as I trust that process. As crazy as that might sound.

For Begins, back in the 1980s there was a man, Bill, who had lost everything and was living in the park down the street from our apartment. We would bring him meals and whatever he needed. He was a kind man and we sat with him and often talked about life and how hard things seemed in a system that always worked against us. As artists and Musicians, we knew all too clearly how society was optimized for those who had money already and how slippery a slope it seemed to get up and out for people like us. We eventually became good friends with Bill, and one day I asked him to pose for photos so that I could use his image I thought was so archetypical for a painting I had envisioned. He happily agreed.

Bill became homeless when he had had all his carpentry tools stolen, and then lost his truck.  With other bad luck happening and not being able to work without tools and transportation he just gave up on the whole system. Eventually finding the park was a good place to live and spend his Summer days. 
After a few weeks, I finished the painting I had imagined. After recording it with photography, and taking it to a photo lab to be shot for reproductions I sent it out to Germany. "Begins" with several other paintings were picked up by my publisher there. When I eventually got a shipment back of the postcards they were already selling throughout Europe. I took a stack of the postcards of "Begins" and gave them to Bill.  He was a bit impressed but was not sure what to do with them, but told him he would think of a way to make them useful. We still helped him out for a few weeks but not long after he migrated away from the park and we never saw him again. 
"BEGINS" was from a short 1-line poem I had written in my notes, " Begins a Star, Begins a World" Essentially the story of a solar system and the star that was the light and the center for all its family planets. The Great Spirit, we may imagine, stokes the fires and nuclear reactions igniting the star's long life. 
We anthropomorphize the world to make life and the world comprehensible. All who see the world from higher awareness in short or long glimpses see that this reality is infinitely amazing, deeply beautiful, and incomprehensibly more interconnected than we can possibly understand. 
The concept for a name such as "God" is a natural way to bring such sacred meaning and deep complexity of thought to our simple everyday lives and into our thoughts, discussions, and proclamations. But we somehow easily reduce the actual understanding to a sound bite where all the deeper meanings become lost and oversimplified. This is why some orthodox religions ban the speaking of the name of God, so we do not diminish such sacred knowledge to deadening and limited words we use to pray or curse with, then picked up through osmosis by our fellow human beings who never had a context to understand the simple name was beyond their understanding and the name is used without a sense of sacredness or a true description or understanding.

I did not use the name 'God" for this or any work but I did anthropomorphize the idea in this that a higher source of being was continually creating our universe. Many of these concepts for images came to me when I was 17 to 19 years of age and had no way to actualize their reality, as my skills had yet to develop to a level, where I could honor the concepts. By the 1980s I was through college courses and worked for printers as an art director and graphic designer, then a typography business, and learned to use my tools to create what I saw in my mind's eye more confidently and with higher standards. Always learning more about drawing and painting with inks, watercolors, oils, acrylics and brushes, airbrushes, and toothbrushes… Yes Toothbrush, but that’s for another story. I went on to freelance and other such graphics jobs. Always painting in my spare time, my spirit supported by my wife and my father.

I had much higher and deeper concepts than I could deal with when I was younger and I guess had enough neurons to hold such ideas. So when I could finally realize concepts in my mind on canvas and paper I painted them.  Some visions I've had for paintings I still am waiting for the right medium and technology to do now. Now with A.I. and the soon-to-come AGI-based tools I will be able to actually do these visions. Not just pretty pictures. Anyone who can paint and draw can make beautiful pictures with simple meanings or simplistic yet profound meanings like beauty, but to create art with deeper ideas that transcend the limits of words and pictures and hint at ideas that stir our souls and earthbound hearts in a deeper awareness of everyday life you must be inspired by visions, dreams or profound experience. 
I don’t think some of my concepts are simple anthropomorphic representations, however. I think such ideas are closer to non-local hinting with greater thought forms. A sort of "trigger" imaging method. I will have a name for it eventually, but then any name will oversimplify its meaning and here we go again, around and around.

 
In Buddhism, there is a path beyond the wheel of Karma. You go around the wheel and it turns round and round with life after life. Yet the goal of Buddhism is to have no more earthly lives. That is an awareness that once you touch and experience the knowledge of you know with all your being, and for the remainder of your life that it defines the map your heart carries and goes onward with you.   

I dearly want to create many more visions from my dreams and understandings. So, maybe another go-around to work out the kinks? 

GMM