whimsical – BlissNinja

Persephones Descent

Short surreal film ritual featuring Reese miller as Persephone/the Kore, and me as Hades

Photographs of Persephone ( see a former blog post of the photographs of Reese as the Kore before the descent and becoming Queen of the underworld)

Pencil Full of Lead

Dance whimsy by Charleen Johnston

Music by Paolo Nutini

A witch I am not

A witch I am not, nor sorceress, nor
Magician manipulating thought and mind
No wizard am I, nor priest divine, nor
Queen in the temple of space and time…
Instead, in red, and black and white
A jester playing with alchemical sight
A fool whose tools are broken rules 
That twist and turn in spools of light…
A psychopomp that swims thru veils
A trickster telling twisting tales
That provoke the nodes and neural codes
To waken from their Prizm Cells

Charleen Johnston
7-23-24

It is a mistake to talk about the artist looking for his subject. In fact, the subject grows within him like a fruit and begins to demand expression. It is like childbirth. The poet has nothing to be proud of. He is not master of the situation, but a servant. Creative work is his only possible form of existence, and his every work is like a deed he has no power to annul. For him to be aware that the sequence of such deeds is due and ripe, that it lies in the very nature of things, he has to have faith in the idea; for only faith interlocks the system of images for which read system of life.

Andrei Tarkovsky

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good. Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act. When a link is established between the work and its beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma. Within that aura which unites masterpieces and audience, the best sides of our souls are made known, and we long for them to be freed. In those moments we recognize and discover ourselves, the unfathomable depths of our own potential, and the furthest reaches of our emotions.

Andrei Tarkovsky

When I speak of the aspiration towards the beautiful, of the ideal as the ultimate aim of art, which grows from a yearning for that ideal, I am not for a moment suggesting that art should shun the ‘dirt’ of the world. On the contrary! the artistic image is always a metonym, where one thing is substituted for another, the smaller for the greater. To tell of what is living, the artist uses something dead; to speak of the infinite, he shows the finite. Substitution… the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews

I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.

Andrei Tarkovsky

An artistic image is one that ensures its own development, its historical viability. An image is a grain, a self-evolving retroactive organism. It is a symbol of actual life, as opposed to life itself. Life contains death. An image of life, by contrast, excludes it, or else sees in it a unique potential for the affirmation of life.
Whatever it expresses—even destruction and ruin—the artistic image is by definition an embodiment of hope, it is inspired by faith.
Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death. Therefore it is
optimistic, even if in an ultimate sense the artist is tragic.
And so there can never be optimistic artists and pessimistic artists. There can only be talent and mediocrity.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Journal 1970-1986

One doesn’t need a lot to be able to live. The great thing is to be free in your work. Ofcourse it’s important to print or exhibit, but if that’s not possible you are still left with the most important thing of all — being able to work without asking anybody’s permission.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Journal 1970-1986

Why are they all trying to make me into a saint?
Oh God! Oh God!
I want to do things. Stop turning me into a saint.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Journal 1970-1986

If you throw even a cursory glance into the past, at the life which lies behind you, not even recalling its most vivid moments, you are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part, the unique individuality of the characters whom you met. This singularity is like the dominant note of every moment of existence; in each moment of life, the life principle itself is unique. The artist therefore tries to grasp that principle and make it incarnate, new each time; and each time he hopes, though in vain, to achieve an exhaustive image of the Truth of human existence. The quality of beauty is in the truth of life.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Our fraught way of life gives each of us a narrowly defined role, creating conditions conducive to developing only those elements in our psyche which allow us to grow within the confines of that role. The other areas of our psyche waste away. Hence lack of contact. Here psychological and social factors combine, and produce fear, distrust, moral baseness and the death of hope.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Journal 1970-1986

For many years I have been tormented by the certainty that the most extraordinary discoveries await us in the sphere of time . We know less about time than about anything else.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Journal 1970-1986

I believe in one thing: the human spirit is immortal and indestructible. In the beyond there could be anything, it is of no importance whatsoever. What we call death is not death. It’s a rebirth. A caterpillar becomes a cocoon. I think there is a life after death and it is that that is unnerving. It would be so much simpler to conceive of oneself as a telephone cord that is unplugged. Then you could live any way that you wanted. God would have no importance of any kind.

Andrei Tarkovsky

If a writer, despite his natural gifts, gives up writing because no one will publish him, then he is no writer. The artist is distinguished by his urge to create, which by very definition is a concomitant of talent.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Journal 1970-1986

The death of childhood is the beginning of poetry.

Andrei Tarkovsky

All creative work strives for simplicity, for perfectly simple expression; and this means reaching down into the furthest depths of the recreation of life. But that is the most painful part of creative work: finding the shortest path between what you want to say or express and its ultimate reproduction in the finished image. The struggle for simplicity is the painful search for a form adequate to the truth you have grasped.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

People have often asked me what the Zone is, and what it symbolises, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is a zone, it’s life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break down or he may come through. Whether he comes through or not depends on his own self-respect, and his capacity to distinguish between what matters and what is merely passing.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Some sort of pressure must exist; the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it’s a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.

Andrei Tarkovsky

My objective is to create my own world and these images which we create mean nothing more than the images which they are. We have forgotten how to relate emotionally to art: we treat it like editors, searching in it for that which the artist has supposedly hidden. It is actually much simpler than that, otherwise art would have no meaning. You have to be a child—incidentally children understand my pictures very well, and I haven’t met a serious critic who could stand knee-high to those children. We think that art demands special knowledge; we demand some higher meaning from an author, but the work must act directly on our hearts or it has no meaning at all.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Never try to convey your idea to the audience – it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they’ll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.

Andrei Tarkovsky

The beautiful is hidden from the eyes of those who are not searching for the truth, for whom it is contra-indicated. But the profound lack of spirituality of those people who see art and condemn it, the fact that they are neither willing nor ready to consider the meaning and aim of their existence in any higher sense, is often masked by the vulgarly simplistic cry, ‘I don’t like it!’, ‘It’s boring!’ It is not a point that one can argue; but it like the utterance of a man born blind who is being told about a rainbow. He simply remains deaf to the pain undergone by the artist in order to share with others the truth he has reached.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Art is a meta-language, with the help of which people try to communicate with one another; to impart information about themselves and assimilate the experience of others. Again, this has not to do with practical advantage but with realising the idea of love, the meaning of which is in sacrifice: the very antithesis of pragmatism. I simply cannot believe that an artist can ever work only for the sake of ‘self-expression.’ Self-expression if meaningless unless it meets with a response. For the sake of creating a spiritual bond with others it can only be an agonising process, one that involves no practical gain: ultimately it is an act of sacrifice. But surely it cannot be worth the effort merely for the sake of hearing one’s own echo?

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

A work becomes dated as a result of the conscious effort to be expressive and contemporary; these are not things to be achieved: they have to be in you. In those arts which count their existence in tens of centuries the artist sees himself, naturally and without question, as more than narrator or interpreter: above all he is an individual who has decided to formulate for others, with complete sincerity, his truth about the world…

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Despite the fact that God lives in every soul, that every soul has the capacity to accumulate what is eternal and good, as a mass people can do nothing but destroy. For they have come together not
in the name of an ideal, but simply for the sake of a material notion.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Finally, I would enjoin the reader—confiding in him utterly—to believe that the one thing that mankind has ever created in a spirit of self-surrender is the artistic image. Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

This is the law of life, its real meaning, that we cannot impose our experience on other people, or force them to feel suggested emotions. Only through personal experience do we understand life.

Andrei Tarkovsky

True artistic inspiration is always a torment for the artist, almost to the point of endangering his life. Its realisation is tantamount to a physical feat.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

How strangely people live. They seem to be in command of the situation and they do not understand that they have been given the chance of living and actually using the opportunity to be free. Everything in this life is terrible, apart from the freedom of will that we possess.

Andrei Tarkovsky

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good…Art can only give food – a jolt – the occasion – for psychical experience.

Andrei Tarkovsky

(Self-portrait series KENNEDY PEAK 7-8-24)

Face of Character

Besides the muscles needed functionally to chew, kiss, sniff, blow, squint, blink, and twitch away
A fly, most of the forty-five facial muscles serve only emotional expression. You don't need them to bring in food, to beat down an enemy, nurse an offspring, or perform sexual intercourse.
The ventriloquist proves they are not needed for speaking. Nor are they essential to breathing, hearing, or sleeping. The extravagance of facial musculature is all for expression of major emotions, yes; but even more for such peculiar subtleties of
civilization as supercilious contempt, wry irony, wide-eyed fawning, cool unconcern, smiling, and sneering.
By means of these muscles, our faces make pictures. The psyche displays aesthetically its states of soul. Character traits become intelligible images; yet each expression is characteristically different, and the more complex the character, the more individual the expression. "There is nothing average about ex-
pression. It is essentially individual. In so far as an average dominates, expression fades."

::::::

~Faces need to be used~

A face is something that is incomplete; a work in progress….faces need to be used because they
are not finished images, says the Chicago art historian James Elkins. Aging as a progress of the face. If you consider your face as one more part of the body, then it withers, crinkles, blotches, and falls away like other parts of the body. If youimagine your face as a phenomenon with a different significance, with its own destiny, then all that goes on there, after
sixty especially, is a work in progress, building the image, preparing a face that has little to do with the faces that you meet. What's going on, rather, is the progress of a portrait, toward a
memory.

"Faces need to be used." How? Out there, weathering and leathering, actively engaged with world? Should we engage in full-face confrontations, get in each other's faces? Another way to use the face is aging. Aging uses the face every day, and it is these traces of use that cosmetic surgery sets out to repair.
Without any effort on our part, quite passively, even in the solitude of a monk's cell, even in an immune-protective bubble, the face is being used.
"The aging process,”
says Levinas, “probably the most perfect model of passive synthesis. " A face is being made, often against your will, as witness to your character.

~James Hillman, The force of character and the lasting life

(Self portraits July 2020 )

The Ninja Steed!

The Ninja Steed has resurrected!!!!! Fresh paint and art and all the goodness and Happy vibes, thank you mister Happy (James Kuhn )for this fabulous expression of the BlissNinja creed 🔥🌟🃏🌟🔥

Happy had some of my ai art with Frankie the opossum etc printed into vinyl and adhered to car, and it’s so fun!!!!! Along with my business logo and the artspace logo and other amazingness. 

It looks nice and  colorful and fun outside of The Art Space on 211!!!!!!!!!!

Whoot Whoot!!!!!

Velvet Thought-Cars

Happy the Artist finished repainting the ninja steed!

Restless nights breed
breathless dreams
Selves are bursting
through my seams
into Abstract
messes of Me
slipping over stars
in velvet thought cars
weaving in and out
of Light
but never getting far
too many times
I have read
between the
l i n e s
and still SunsRays seep
into mine
split and splayed she
sings her rhyme
time after time
and sight after sight
fighting for life
In this restless night
these listless dreams
free me it
seems
but still I am salvaged
from selves
sweet struggle
pledged against
the rubble of Will
to lift the gift
to the top of the
Hill
where light and rhyme
build to climb
puzzles melting into
Mind
sweeping color over
the lines
smiling despite
the salt crystallized
from tear formalized
Into fear
and the night grows on
the night glows on
strangers in song
whispering parodies
In Vogue
tongues outstretched
to taste the load
this I know
Is Selves in Silence
shards of sacred
on shelves of violence
whence we came and
whither we go
spiraling in and out
of the show
taking our turns on tiptoe
as the shake moves
thru the dance
penetrating glance
from
those who star
In the versions of Play
that gather where you are.

Charleen Johnston 2002

The Damned Thing Will not Fit

The most thoroughly and relentlessly damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all ‘Damned Things’ is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this ‘Damned Thing’ into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the ‘Damned Thing’ will not fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the ‘Damned Thing’ will not fit into their slots.

Robert Anton Wilson