In 1993 I traveled in Thailand and Indonesia. I visited briefly several Thai Islands in the Andaman sea, crossed the border to Malaysia by boat and sailed onwards to Sumatra. There I stayed for a while on Pulau Weh at the Northern tip of the archipel. It’s a tiny Blue Lagoon island. The fish we ate for lunch and diner was harpooned five minutes before on the reef.
At that time the coral was still pristine and full with life.

Today I was shocked by the news that the tsunamis sent out by a massive earthquake in the Indian ocean near Indonesia hit the Thai coast. Two friends are holidaying at some Ko (Thai island) there. These past weeks we followed their adventures on the beach in their travel log. By cell phone someone was able to contact them and put in the comments that they fled into the mountains before the tsunami swamped the island.

foto: Maurice Amoureus

www.nu.nl

Yesterday I made some comments on illustrators in Holland
My friend Mark is an illustrator and this is the new year card he send us today.
Also a Happy Merry Christmas to you Mark.
Check out his site at
www.marksmolders.com

It’s not art that dominates today’s visual culture and in the U.S. the home of Pop Art they are very aware of this. Over there illustrators are taken more serious as a creative designer and artist. It’s easier to get your illustrations put up in a decent Art gallery in the U.S. then in Holland. Generally the art-scene here is more conservative and traditional as we do have some fresh illustrators and designers but they hardly get exposure.

The paintings of Moira Hahn are very narrative and make me think she was an illustrator before, there’s also a Time cover illustration on the front page of her portfolio. There aren’t many illustrators here in Holland who crossed over from illustration to planet Art. www.moirahahn.com (link via art-bbq)

Searching images for ‘Sri Yantra’ in Google brought me to the experiment below where the yantra is projected into three dimensions. The Sri Yantra can be used to meditate upon. The small dot and focal point in the centre is named bindu.
The transverse triangles represent the volume expansion of bindu, the emergence of 3-D space, of the original nature, of creation.
This experiment with the 3-D yantra is a beautifull illustration of an article I stumbled upon last summer. I thought to put them together here:

“The universe was not there in the beginning. Or if it were there, what had then become of it? One view is that it had shrunk to a bindu. Bindu means point. The universe had contracted to a point. That is just it’s way, now it contracts; now it expands. It is a perpetual cycle stretched over bilions of human years. Expansion is creation and contraction is dissolution.

In geometry a point has position but no dimensions. The position of a thing is in relation to other things in space. Since bindu is the is the contraction of the whole universe, of the whole time-space-mind continuum, it can have no position. Since it has no dimension, and since it is the contraction of time-space-mind, the mind just cannot grasp it. For a three dimensional mind to grasp a thing, that thing has to be three dimensional too. For the mind a thing without dimensions doesn’t exist at all. that’s why the bindu is beyond comprehension and equal to nothing.

For the bindu to burst into being again, to stretch out it’s withdrawn dimensions and thus expand again it needs a bang-start. The form of this bang-start comes from desire. The bindu desired to expand again, to burst into being again, to be manifest and to multiply. Desire heated it up to a fireball bursting with desire. At the extreme height of heat and pressure it just exploded. This explosion of bindu is called Bindu Vishphota. The explosion stretched forth, well outside it’s withdrawn dimensions. It startes to expand. It ceased to be nothing. It bounced back into being.

The present 3-D space is the volume of expansion of bindu. This volume is called Saguna Brahm (dimensioned Brahmn). This Saguna Brahmn is the 3D-isation of Nirguna Brahm (dimensionless Brahmn) that is the original bindu. Saguna Brahmn and Moola Prakriti (the original nature) are one and the same.

All that occupies the 3-D space is it’s own local temporary warps. By warping itself Nature creates all. The triangles with their vertices represent the expansion of bindu- the emergence of 3D space of moola prakriti, of creation. What expands Bindu into volume is its Brimhita bang, represented by the space enclosed by the tranversed triangles and surounding bindu. ”

Original text by K.M. Gupta in the Times of India someday last summer.
Images found with Google.

This invitation was in my mailbox today.
I’ll be there Bart.