Catmasutra - Free wallpaper for clouds 9!

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"When you realize how perfect everything is,
you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky"
- Gautama Siddharta.

This is the premise of "Cloud 9" a Catmasutra painting done in the 2006 exhibition. As this catmasutra cat knows, the purpose of life is to climb the sky and find a great big Cumulus cloud to sleep in. So use this wallpaper as a reminder to put a smile on your face, and if you don't feel like it , just visualize floating and lying on one of those fluffy incarnations in the sky wahahaha!

"We had the sky up there,
and we used to lay on our backs
and look up at them,
and discuss whether
they was made or just happened"
- Mark Twain

Well, that to a degree, reflects my fascination with the sky. And strangely enough, it is the cat that taught me how to appreciate the sky. Remembering as a child in the yard of my grandma's house, lying on the bleached dry cemented floor, watching the wet clothes swaying, half revealing and half waving the clouds goodbye, like a peek-a-boo of sorts. It all started with a promise made with the cat, that when we meet here in the yard, we would just stretch out and do nothing; we would watch the sky, enjoy the moment till one of us decides to call it a day. I kept wondering how wide the sky is as you can see it curve away down below you and beyond. And you wonder if it is the same sky on the other side.

“In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west;
people create distinctions out of their own minds
and then believe them to be true.” - - Gautama Siddharta.

;)

See no evil...

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves -
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true -
Demosthenes

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult. - George Eliot

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. - Virginia Woolfe

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence -Frederick Douglas

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. - Winston Churchill

;)

Time to pause and reflect...

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority,
it is time to pause and reflect.

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.
It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

Happiness is not something ready made.
It comes from your own actions.

If you can, help others;
if you cannot do that, at least do not harm them.

The ultimate authority must always rest with
the individual's own reason and critical analysis.

And

always do right.
This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Also
Golf is a good walk spoiled...

Mark Twain & Dalai Lama

;)

Catmasutra - Humpty Dumpty

There is something about Fairy tales and Nursery Rhymes. They have been entrenched so gradually that they are buried and dismissed ever so quietly. Yet, when they are re-interpreted , they can reveal so much more for we all think we already know them.... wahahahah

From the City of Glass, Paul Auster
for his stories ain't a fairy tale....

"Humpty Dumpty. You know who I mean. The egg."
"As in 'Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall'?"
"Exactly."
"I don't understand."
"Humpty Dumpty: the purest embodiment of the human condition. Listen carefully sir. What is an egg? It is that which has not yet been born. A paradox, is it not? For how can Humpty Dumpty be alive if he has not been born? And yet, he is alive – make no mistake.
We know that because he can speak…"

“… In his little speech to Alice (Through the looking glass), Humpty Dumpty sketches the future of human hopes and gives the clue to our salvation: to become masters of the words we speak, to make language answer our needs. Humpty Dumpty was a prophet, a man who spoke truths the world was not ready for.”

“A man?”

“Excuse me. A slip of the tongue. I mean an egg. But the slip is instructive and helps to prove my point. For all man are eggs, in a manner of speaking. We exist, but we have not yet achieved the form that is our destiny. We are pure potential, an example of the not-yet-arrived. For man is a fallen creature – we know that from Genesis. Humpty Dumpty is also a fallen creature. He falls from his wall, and no one can put him back together again – neither the king, nor his horses, nor his men. But that is what we must all now strive to do. It is our duty as human beings: to put the egg back together again. For each of us, sir, is Humpty Dumpty. And to help him is to help ourselves.”

"It's been a long time
been a long time coming
held my breath too long
have to get back to the surface..."
(haha was listening to Concave Scream's Horizons)

;)

Catmasutra- Mind Shaper

He soared with an inexplicable joy when he finally landed on the board. The tender air and the ancient sky, rectilinear and dreamlike, suspended them in mid-air. Moving closer to the edge, the clouds drifted in happy realms of a forgotten childhood. He paused. He couldn't remember exactly but felt as if he had come home after years of wandering.


The board rose high above the maternal darkness below. Looking down, it divided day and night into two equal parts, one belonging to the substance of all dreams, and the other to the manifestation of the material world. And yet it was a spectacular place to be in, where you can drift in and out between the two planes. What is within is reflected without. If only he could remember his travels in these dreams.

At the edge of the board, he finally felt as if he had arrived at his life's true destination. He felt it as a mood of at-homeness. Knowledge of power had taken on the most extraordinary shapes of gods and angels. Then came the courage to dare, and the leap of faith to step out of himself into unbounded realms, free-falling into the living dreams of the universe.

associative writing based on
Ben Okri's
Astonishing the Gods

;)

Catmasutra - One

What forms a sentence? What forms words that give rise to a sentence? By virtue of imagination, we create thoughts and whip them into shape, translate them into words and action. The origin of everything begins with a thought. That's the beginning of a cause. The words or actions are the effects. When we are aware of this mode of creation, we get a glimpse of the kind of power we have, for good or bad. That's when we realize we always have a choice. That is the power of freewill. If we can be still for a while, we can catch that one thought that will lead us to wherever we want to go. That begs the question, "Is ignorance really blissful"? Is it always someone else's fault? Did we play a part in whatever that has happened, for good or for bad? We can only act for ourselves and be responsible for our own choices. If we make the right choice, we are free and happy. If we make the wrong choice, we are trapped and frustrated. There is no need to blame anyone else. We can only be comfortable in our own skin and not anyone's else.

So be still, catch that one thought that will change your life!
"Therein resides three thousand realms in a single life-moment..."

;)

Catmasutra - Forty Winks and the tapestry of dreams

Gustav Klimt is one of my favorite artists, with "The Kiss" being one of the best loved decorative paintings in the history of art. There is a lot of sensuality in Klimt's works which borders on the mythical and subconscious. This painting was actually conceptualized for Catmasutra II exhibition back in 2005, whereby in the process of "reversing pop art", I took high art and immersed it with Catmasutra's joie de vivre! Some of the pieces included Halo having a time of her life in Monet's Water Lily garden (“Serenading Monet”), Magritte's Green Apple (“Apple on the Inside”), Warhol's Campbell Soup (“Fish Soup”), Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres (Mooching by the Bay), Botero's dancers, Hockney's Splash (Before the Splash), Rousseau's Merry Jesters (Jesters' Paradise), Van Gogh's Chair (Coffeebreak at Vincent's)!

I wanted to include a piece on Klimt but the style seems to be at odds with Catmasutra's sensibilities. Catmasutra is irreverent, with a devil-may-care bravado, the colors bold and strong, while Klimt's works are of a mythic proportion dealing with archetypes of both good and evil, light and dark, and invites you to a place of your wildest dreams and your deepest fears. For the longest time, I was unable to reconcile this piece...


I have sketched it out but was unable to breathe life into it. The inspiration then were two pieces of work, Water Snakes and Goldfish (top). I have always liked water and what it represents, the fluidity of the stream of life, and how we would reap the benefits if we flow with it rather than paddle against it. Klimt's mythical creatures seem to relish this flow of life into the subconscious, a surrender to the uncontrolled upsurging of the life force. Haha It's a different plane altogether from Catmasutra, which may derive its force from the subconscious but is more of a display of irreverence on the conscious mind.

Shaken from my slumber, I took the canvas out, contemplated my palette of colors and decided to just go with intuition. Gold and blue metamorphosing to a luminous green, silver and purple, orange and gold... weaving through a tapestry of dreams with Halo as the vehicle for sleep (for she can sleep 23 hours a day!), catching forty winks under the bed, and otherwise dead to the world. Cats are possibly the only true masters of the art of sleeping. If we need to dream, perhaps we should borrow more sleep time from a cat, and get nine lives worth!

;)

Catmasutra - 6-9

6. Life should be full of playfulness.
Continued seriousness is but a few degrees removed from gloom and melancholy...

7. What you resist persists. - Carl Jung
If you cannot beat them, join them...
Letting go is the hardest and yet the most rewarding...


7.Whether you think you can or think you can't,
either way you're right. - Henry Ford
I'm a non-smoker who smokes...
Not a smoker who doesn't smoke -
the right way to the last stick...

;)