Catmasutra 4 - Tomato-based Cat Fish Soup

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible,
then they seem improbable, and then,
when we summon the will,
they soon become inevitable.

If your cat squeeze into a can of tomato soup with its favorite fish bone , you'll end up with a real bundle of messy delight - just as if Santa Claus were to squeeze himself down a chimney with his huge load of Christmas goodies. Those must be happy times - improbable things that happen, that make us smile and laugh. Can you remember those moments in the past year?

Sometimes it seems that we are living the same life many times over, the same cycles with more or less of the same. It's like in this big book of life, most of our pages are blank except for the few planned holidays and special occasions that we jot down in our calendar. Maybe we should just slow things down a tad and take some time to savor each day, allowing the flavor of happiness to permeate our life. Happiness is a simple thing - we don't have to wait for that holiday or to buy that branded product. It is freely available now in this present moment. The more you let go, the more space you have for happiness.

The key to happiness is having dreams...
the key to success is making dreams come true.



;)

Catmasutra 4 - Paper Boat

Rainy days are special days, and I remember always running out to watch the rain as a child. Sometimes, I made paper boats and set them afloat onto the drain. I watch them travel as far down as possible before the rain beat them down. Sometimes after a thunderstorm, a new scene emerges as if the old one has been peeled away. Perhaps that is the true reality, that every moment is a new beginning if we catch ourselves and choose to see it.

At the end of each cycle, at the end of each dark cloud, a bright one is always waiting to shine through. Perhaps as we grow older, we discriminate too much, tend to see everything as a continuity, from one thing to the next, from the past to the present into the future. If one paper boat sinks, we can always make another one! No matter what we plan to do, we should act on the thought without thinking too much about it. When we think we can do something later, we would have lost the moment. Like a child running out to play in the rain, he would never have to think twice!


There is always more than one way to live a life. The "real world" is never really out there, but if you believe what others tell you, then that is your real world. People from different cultures think differently. We think differently in part because our government has taught us how to think. If everything revolves around money and stability and growth, then that is your reality.
It takes a lot of courage and practice to believe in oneself but it's definitely more exciting than living a life that is not entirely yours.

Stories are always true,
it's the facts that mislead.

;)

Catmasutra 4!

Catch all the catmasutra cats in action till 23rd December at Utterly Art! First off, many thanks to all who attended the reception and to all who has supported Catmasutra one way or another! It's still on, so spread the word and pop by if you have the chance or are around the area. Make sure you catch some of the infectious Catmasutra spirit that I have been addicted to especially in the last couple of months! Well, it's been quite a year for me, visualizing and "watching" blank canvases filled up with ideas and transformed into these irreverent eyes-wide-shut, ear-to-ear-grin art pieces!

And both Halo and Angel are part of the painting process, through and through, adding their "sleep" essence as well as other antics such as scratching me and asking for food when I'm too engrossed with my painting, and of course providing some well-timed comic relief as well.

True tell, Angel and Halo are the breaks actually as they remind me to always live in the now. haha. The point of power is always in the present moment and by fully living in the now, we can transform the past and even the future, and that, I think is the true essence of freedom. Life is as simple as that and yet it is one of the hardest things to do. Catmasutra is about that moment of creation in between the power of everyday and the power of myth and magic. "In between lies art".

For many of these paintings, there is a point where a leap of faith becomes essential. You're not sure how you are going to paint it, but you know you're going to paint it anyhow. Sometimes, the process is so intuitive that you think that everything is connected to everything else. Sometimes, you're afraid that it's not gonna work but you keep at it because you trust it to work! Each painting seems to have its own energy that drives itself, that allows itself to be painted. And on many occasions, upon completion, you tell yourself you're not gonna sell that painting... wahahaha


I guess one of the benefits of painting is that it allows you to be still, to be of one mind and body. You are aware of it and then you let it go, and something else takes over. And you're amazed when you've finished a particular section of a painting that you think is rather difficult to do. That is perhaps one of the joys of painting!

“Art is contemplation.
It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature
and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated.”
Auguste Rodin

Catmasutra 4, the exhibition!

CATMASUTRA IV PAINTING EXHIBITION

UTTERLY ART - 13th - 23rd DECEMBER 2007
Tel: + 65 6226 2605 Cell: 94872006 Contact: Keng Hock
Email: utterlyart@pacific.net.sg

229A South Bridge Road Singapore 058778 2nd Level
Opening hours: 11am to 8pm, Monday to Sunday

;)

Catmasutra 4 - peekaboo!

Interview with the artist at Sparklette.net

Catmasutra 4 featured in CulturePush

;)

Catmasutra 4, the exhibition!

CATMASUTRA IV PAINTING EXHIBITION

UTTERLY ART - 13th - 23rd DECEMBER 2007
Tel: + 65 6226 2605 Cell: 94872006 Contact: Keng Hock
Email: utterlyart@pacific.net.sg

229A South Bridge Road Singapore 058778 2nd Level
Opening hours: 11am to 8pm, Monday to Sunday

;)

Catmasutra - Big Mind, Small Mind

This is a play on Play Imaginative's flagship designer toy, Trexi - a 3-inch tall action figure with a rotating head and articulated limbs. The Catmasutra cat draws its essence from my cat Halo, and the Trexi "mini-me" draws its essence from the Catmasutra cat. They are different, yet the same, as they are both the essence of the artist. And yet in creating them, the artist is both catmasutra cat and the Trexi! Haha... And Trexi has a new Catmasutra manifestation now in addition to the ones by Tokidoki and Devilrobots... "Big Mind, Small Mind" is also an abstraction using a little Zen as a reference philosophy... So still yourself as I indulge myself...

;)

Trace every man-made thing around us and you will be led back to the same origin - a singular thought that sets into motion new cycles that intertwine and create even more and newer cycles, that reinforces one more than the other. If the cycle gets big enough, you'll have a powerful engine that manifests and make real, our hopes and dreams, our fears and greed, just as electricity was discovered, just as the atomic bomb was made, just as our capacity for war and peace manifests themselves internally and externally.

"What happened did happen, but not before it was so powerful an idea
that it took shape and form and ripped through the thin skin
that separates potential from event."
~Jeanette Winterson , "The Stone Gods",
on the actuality of a third world war, a nuclear war

Just as the atomic bomb was built to end all wars...

In 1942 the Manhattan Engineer Project was set up in the United States under the command of Brigadier General Leslie Groves... By the time the atom bomb was ready to be used Germany had surrendered. Leo Szilard and James Franck circulated a petition among the scientists opposing the use of the bomb on moral grounds. However, the advice was ignored by Harry S. Truman, the USA's new president, and he decided to use the bomb on Japan.

On 6th August 1945, a B29 bomber dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima. It has been estimated that over the years around 200,000 people have died as a result of this bomb being dropped. Japan did not surrender immediately and a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later. On 10th August the Japanese surrendered. The Second World War was over. ~source, spartacus

...the atomic bomb was built to end all wars.
The nuclear age had begun.

Our personal history is the history of the world - just that we don't know it yet. The way we think, the way we live, choosing one over the other, reinforcing one over the other, is the history of the world. Our reality is never All or Nothing. It is not a complete physical reality, and at the same time it is not completely in our mind. Our reality is All and Nothing.

Everything is included within your mind. Nothing can come from outside. If they do, it only means that something appears in your mind. If you do not exist, then everything else ceases to exist. In order for me to exist, you have to exist and everything else must exist. This is the essence of big mind, neither coming or going, but ever present in everyone and everything; it is only in the reality of this present that we can find peace and harmony.

When we dwell only in the physical reality, then we are always affected by external circumstances. We will always be waging wars with ourselves, with good, evil, injustice, with what we think is right or wrong, with the idea of lack or abundance. This is our mind that is related to something outside itself, one that sees differences between you and I, between the colors of our skins, our beliefs, our possessions. This is the small mind. This is us with a rotating head and articulated limbs, in a modern consumer world, where we are conditioned to protect ourselves from every insecurity, difficulty and discomfort...

A quantum universe - neither random or determined.
A universe of potentialities,
waiting for an intervention to affect the outcome.
Love is an intervention. why do we not choose it?
~Jeanette Winterson , "The Stone Gods",

;)

been reading too much zen...
Shunryu Suzuki, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield

there is always magic

Catmasutra 4, the exhibition!


UTTERLY ART - 13th - 23rd DECEMBER 2007
CATMASUTRA IV PAINTING EXHIBITION

229A South Bridge Road Singapore 058778 2nd Level
Opening hours: 11am to 8pm, Monday to Sunday

;)

Catmasutra - The Bearable Lightness of Being

A lotus for you,
a Buddha to be.

"...the exuberant, unfolding, unpredictable universe, expanding when it should be contracting, made largely of something that is not something but nothing - dark energy, anti-matter. A thing unconfined.
What to say when the certainties fail?
Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. "

Strangely enough, I did this painting from negative to positive, from dark to light, beginning with a black-greenish background, outlined with white chalk before painting in the colors. And the lotus actually grows in muddy waters while it rises above the surface to bloom. When the sun sets, the lotus flower closes and sinks underwater but at dawn, it reappears in all its splendor, untouched by impurity. And I painted the cat in its usual cheeky and blissful self, completely oblivious of everything else but the here and now, lying on a large lotus leaf, with three fishes leading the way, guided by lotus flowers as nature's signposts.

There is no past, no future in the here and now, just the cat drifting through a vast thought that becomes an entire universe. Everything is as they should be, the present moment as it is, without the pull of the past or push of the future - this bearable lightness of being - the only moment that really belongs to us. When we touch this moment, everything becomes real. I miss this painting already, having brought most of the paintings to the gallery.

Do not lose yourself in the past,
do not run after the future.

To lose the present is to lose life.

Quotes by Jeanette Winterson, Buddha, Thich Nhat Hanh



Catmasutra 4, the exhibition!


UTTERLY ART - 13th - 23rd DECEMBER 2007
CATMASUTRA IV PAINTING EXHIBITION

229A South Bridge Road Singapore 058778 2nd Level
Opening hours: 11am to 8pm, Monday to Sunday

;)