A Spiritual life...

On and off I go to a place called Spiritual forums and at this very moment several of the threads I'm interested in seem to be coalescing into an overall depiction of where I might be at spiritually.

But before I go any further I'd have to say that the role of spirituality in my life is more important than anything else... even art. And it has been for quite a while, about two or three years now and somewhat coincidentally my removal from art as a motivating force and spirituality becoming prime are inextricably linked... as they should be.

It was the last show at Pierre's where I started quite late but once underway had spirit on my shoulder the whole way. So much work got done and involved huge amounts of risk but I just went with the flow of it all and stopped certain jobs when it seemed right and started in on others when they seemed right. All the while it seemed a huge task but it all came together at the end and I filled a room with all my own artworks... my first solo show!

The fact nothing sold though somehow seemed unimportant as I walked straight into working on expanding Pierre's gallery and even within that all the things that wanted done came easily into my imagination fully formed and somehow only requiring Pierre's faith and money stream to come into existence.

But Pierre ran out of money so I walked and by then I knew our time together was over. This is about when all the events leading up to the show made such an absolute sense that it would have been silly to expect things to go on in the same vein. Yes I could have made bigger and finer artworks and looked for another gallery to emblazon them within but that just felt pointless as it felt like I'd made all the points worth making within the final show and that the people who actually took any notice were just reminding themselves of stuff they already knew.

And the spiritual aspect, that for years anyways, I'd be working to bring less ego into the work... planned outcomes as it were, and just going within the materials themselves and fulfilling the requirements of a future generated within those materials had been the fulfillment I'd been seeking anyways and that this final show of work totally and utterly ended any need to progress further along those lines seemed entirely self evident.

Also at this time, about two years ago... maybe three, I'm not sure exactly, I finally had the time and the space, within deciding to let art go yet again (it has been a somewhat recurring theme throughout my life... as if this tendency from my youngest years always needs holidays more than I do), to really have a go go at a book by Eckhart Tolle called "The Power of Now" which had been suggested to me as a good read by someone from my past who's spiritual judgement I hold in high esteem.

The thing is I started meditating when I was still a teenager and merely used it as a relaxation technique and have been doing it on and off for years and I think that getting the Eckhart Tolle book and it's aim to have one stop ones thinking and just be within the moment really felt like the next logical step in my life.

Logical too because I've always been a lucky son of a gun and for years previous to this the need to make money to exist has been almost eradicated so for almost a decade now I've been ablt to do whatever I decide wants doing... to the extent that I've looked back at several things I got interested in and wondered how I ever found the money to get so deeply into tinkeriing and discovering certain lines of enquiry which never seemed to make the money to keep doing them. I don't think about it though and always just put it down to luck and just keep being curious and taking the odd risk that looks like it'll be fun!

But back to the art which had been veering right into non thinking anyways. All the artworks of at least the last decades worth were either visions that popped into my head fully formed or things I started from scratch and just followed within the context of what the materials seemed to want to achieve. No planning or drawing, except the least possible to get me started, and being within the moments of what was directly in front of me or what was on the edges waiting it's turn.

So the art was no longer an end in itself but a tool of a spiritual nature that I was learning to use and not only that but once these artworks were created it was like they then became directive of connections within life that led to further unfolding of the true reality underlying existent life.

Then I basically meditated for about a year whilst reading the Power of Now and giving myself completely to the discoveries this involved... it was glorious year that ended on the precipice of enlightenment, and enlightenment that was engulfing me but was held back by residual fear. Residual fear I had no idea was there but was there indeed!

This then led me to pondering how the enlightened soul lives within life. I felt, and could be wrong, of course, that if I was still alive then that meant doing something or other to continue existence and that whatever it was, and an enlightened soul, needed to exist together, in and of the same body, without resistance and that these residual fears, whatever they might be, needed cleansing and to be without resistance within living... I think.

What's really quite beautiful though is I really have absolutely no idea what's going on. I'm still bludgeoning my way through life like a bull in china shop and still creating big huge messes all over the place but I'm calmer than I've ever been. Or to be more precise I'm still frenetic and whirling but I've tasted enough of that absolute calm and quiet that resides within all of us that I'm no longer as concerned with doing it right as I might have once been. It'll work itself out regardless and though all my past pain is with me almost all the time I'm accepting of that and willing a friendliness with that pain, an nonresistance that has it slowly diminishing at it's own pace.  It's not hiding somewhere deep inside of me anymore and pushing me towards revealing itself... it's here and now and that's fine!

And one of the reasons it's all good, no matter what, is the glimpses deep meditation has brought to me of what may be the ultimate reality... or what I can ascribe to such, which is just such absolute bliss, total peace, stillness and contentment that even the words used to describe them utterly fall short of the being within such.

I mean art's still neato and I may even get around to doing some more but I doubt it'll ever have any real meaning from here on in and just be something, like everything else I do, I do to pass time... well that doesn't explain it so well, something to be within time... if that makes any sense.

Being of this life but not of it at the same time.

I just went outside to get some plumbing stuff and reminded myself of what a glorious mess my life is... all the tools and bits of wood and weeds spreading accross all my attempts to put nature in it's place, it's all just such a great intertwinning of in- consequence I'd be hard pressed to tidy up in the decades I might have until I finally leave this mortal coil... but what that's really means is I'm home at last.

The task is to just tidy it all up now so whomever has to deal with after I'm gone... doesn't have too much to do. It may turn out that the finished result is actually art.

The Art Fair?

Long before I even thought of the possibility of being an Artist I had been introduced to the environment of selling commodities through buying an end of lease Musical Instrument store in Otahuhu. It was about 1990, or thereabouts, and the owner was over it and uninterested and with a loan from my parents I bought the shop usage.

Then came a short period of realising that I had to buy stock, and which to actually buy, as I got used to the day to day running of a business. Prior to '87 I had a landscaping business I built up from nothing and in both instances, within the Music world I'd been teaching myself how to repair and maintain guitars, mainly electric, it was about having a skill I could market and then finding a way to engage with the publics needs. The music shop was really interesting as it was my first foray into garden variety retailing where you buy stock and resell it within certain accepted percentages. That's to say that the margins for profit where reselling at half again what stuff cost to buy.

I realised almost straight away that I sold more if I lowered those margins but that's another story. The point was that as a seller of articles I bought the merchandise and sold it on and the only thing that really mattered was choosing the right articles to sell.

So what struck me as obscene as I found my way into the Art World was that the seller not only didn't have to buy the article but they didn't even pay the rent to show the article as all this was passed onto the artist as costs for the show.

I can understand this, to a certain degree, if an artist is unknown, as the Gallery owners are taking a risk in showing unseen art and this then gives the art world it's defining gesture which is that it is a speculative field and therefore the understanding is that the artist supplies the work and pays for the chance to do so and the dealer puts up their reputation.

But when you go to the art fair it is patently obvious that this isn't so. Well, on the surface we have this speculative gesture, this parading of the new and the vanguards of progress, but it's only a veneer and a veneer that is getting thinner and thinner as costs rise to the dealer to have their chosen stock brought before the public.

And it seems to be that while there is a limited availability on money to be spent on the purchase of art, and one supposedly dwindling as the global economy crunches down into survival mode, there is absolutely no shortage of minds and hearts wanting, by guilt of association, to be a part of this commercialisation of the intelligentsia, and so this gives all the credence the dealer network needs not to be held morally accountable for the way in which it defines it's economic viability.

To me it is very much alike the corporate piracy of the recent few decades where the factories that supply small hand to mouth towns with their survival are bought out and sold off by ripping out the machines and on selling to the highest bidder. Short term profits by the capital holders are held higher than the long term survival of the non capital holders who rely on the industry to allow them trading their labour for existence.

So while we walk into the "Art Fair" we might wish that we see as much art as we can and that it be a fair representation of what art actually is but we see nothing of the sort. What we do see is a small select portion of what is art that has been hand picked to provide the survival of the dealers of that product.

Case in point is that the little side show provided for aftershow entertaiment at the letting space which shows 16 little vids of interviews, only 2 are with artists. That's 12%... which isn't much. The other 88% of commentary is provided by the hangers on who define the content after it is created which is alike Fonterra is to farmers and imagine if the ownership of Fonterra was split the same way!

And this reason all of this happens is just the same as why the corporate raiders are able to denude countries economic bases with such gay abandon. The resource is always expanding. The natural resource that is art production is always there with willing confederates who will jump at the chance to force feed the mill with it's produce. The mill is the gallery network and it's stands at the river mouth of the great natural resource that is art and it pollutes and defiles it. It does absolutely nothing to conserve and keep for posterity the magnificence of natural creative intent.

Ok, I'm being overly dramatic but it's only to make a point and I don't blame the dealers for making use of the resource... they know not what they do, and I don't blame the artists either. I don't actually blame anyone because non one is to blame. Finding a scapegoat to burn on the pyre of righteousness is just silly and it never solved anything in the past nor will it change our futures for such moralistic depictions are actually symptomatic of the causes that create these types of problems in the first place.

So then it behooves me as the depicter of a problem to then offer a solution. Maybe when a far greater amount of people see it as a problem then it might be time to think about possible solutions but at the moment when the problem parades as the solution it seems somewhat moot.

The Old Man's treasure.

On this previous Monday I decided to find the inorganic and do a little searching and listening as I had quite a good day selling on the markets of Sunday so I wanted more interesting stuff which I could use to barter in the realm of psychological tendencies at the end of this month. But it's also very much a tuning up exercise as we drive about quietly reviewing swags on the verge and listening for intuitive insights.

Theres a sense of treasure waiting to be found that encourages me to do this, a memory of a future where I have the thing or things at home later and I'm sitting there appreciating the Humanity that made such a thing possible. So while I pass pile after pile of sadness and lack theres usually something telling me that to keep going will eventually unearth vitality and relevance, like a brightness shining just beyond  the next hill, or an old song so soft it can hardly be heard.

Eventually I was simply drawn to a meagre pile which just had two small wooden logs which weren't the branching parts so would split quite easily for firewood, well at the least the bottom one was while the top was a wood lathe blank of especially interweaved growth and at this time the old man who'd built the review of no longer wanted came walking up to chat... and chat we did.

I expressed that I'd finally set up a wood lathe and especially like the meditative dimension of having to take time to get what we wanted and this seemed to be the response he was after and he invited me onto his property to see something that might interest me. I've learned that to be invited is always brings a deeper unfolding than asking and that the expression of ones own delights will always yield more than specifically digging through desires that demand quenching.

In a little room off the back of his garage was his wood turning area and my eyes were drawn to a line of old chisels on the bench which were all haphazard and unmatched but what he offered me was a set of unused Marples chisels at a bargain basement price of five bucks each, so forty for the set still in box, and, of course, my response was that that was too cheap and I'd be happy to give him a hundred for them.

For some reason I then mentioned a motorcycle in decrepit condition that I'd seen on the other side of the rubbish territories which had caught my eye as a potential project to keep me in trouble (later in the day I went back as my knocks on the house door had not been answered and my thought was that the owner was at work so an evening inquiry would be more suitable to answers... which it was but this broken motorcycle was a testament, a monument, to Police brutality as the owner stood in the darkened doorway of this old house which had obviously been passed to him by parents now deceased or at least very close to such and that this incident in his past was now his identifying gesture within a world he no longer saw as a place to embrace his courage and determination... sad, and no motorcycle for me... yet, as I did actually leave a note in the mailbox with an offer and my phone number and given such individuals can often get into trouble with forgotten bills then I just may get a call someday) and this too lit up the old fellows eyes with a sparkle of shared inconsistencies and he led me then to the garage under the house and opening to the street.

And such treasures! It seems his own eye was such that the same type of ugly appealed to us both... the type of ugly that was so of it's time that it was passed over so quickly and discarded even quicker that it rarity now is the stuff of legends, legends in the making which are always better than legends kept alive, and so we did the little dances of voice that enamoured us to the other as we passed from cold artifact to even colder artifact, going deeper into his cave, and my brain became chained to my heart and laid sticky rubber burnouts across futures even I'm loathe to fill.

I left with a light heart soon after as the old chap was tiring without any promises or commitments and only him telling me to think on it for a while then return.

Then I went back yesterday with my heart in my mouth feeling like I was stomping across the broken glass shards of a dream so I walked especially softly as I asked that I be able to list the things and photograph them. Now two hours hence I go back for my appointment and I feel less inclined to own any of the things, not because they aren't beautiful and wouldn't enjoy their company but because the dream is turning to reality and I remember that such things all to often just become more things.

So my responsibility, if indeed I have one, is to become an agent of sorts... maybe. I'm not altogether sure but uppermost is that this older recipient of dreams still has them even while they may be fading and that those glories demand I walk back into his life with humility and respect. I don't actually know if I'm capable of such and that if I do call him Sir, like all those polite American youngsters do in the movies, would it be empty of validity, would it be a false oath to a fealty I do not feel?

The acquiring of stuff seems almost mote somehow and that the challenge is to create bridges between the few others, maybe even me, who might come into possession of such gold as is on hidden display, and the guardian at the gates so that little is lost of the intangible parts of such concrete depictions. I don't know and may be guilty of adding nobility where it has never resided... or maybe that's what it's actually all about... that nobility is where we put it, despite what it is supposedly represented by.

I actually sold stuff...

I tried a different tack yesterday at the Grey Lynn Car Boot sale that actually ended up with sales. I took in old stuff, not made by me, which I have been keeping for projects but decided they won't ever be used but then used that need to cherish them still to set the prices fairly high. I always treat selling as more of a game now than any actual imperative to accumulate money and in this instance the choice of articles and demeanor in stating their value seemed to come together to end in the exchange of currencies.

It has always, in my life, been a source of intrigue and curiousity as to what others find valuable and worth buying. And not so much the thing itself as much as the reasoning and/or the emotion we might use to ascribe value to something.

And, of course, apart from the items or articles that allow us to be warm, fed and sheltered nothing else really has any use other than the defining gestures of personality. You are what you wear is actually you think you are what you wear because you are you no matter what you wear so it's the thinking that makes the difference.

This isn't new stuff and goes as far back as anything else does but can be locked down fairly easily to Buddha and his teachings as the source of all suffering. I'm sure others came across such insights in way, way distant past but I would suppose Buddha was one of the first to have enough critical acclaim to knot the rope of consequence around him as the first but who knows maybe the terrible trio of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates were also onto the same kind of thing.

But what it is safe to say is that for as long as human kind have had the gift of language to converse in we've had a few on the edges wondering why we do what we do and then comes the question of what is done with that speculative wondering.

In a sense that brings us back to the beginning of this narrative where I might be saying not that I make and collect things to sell but that I make and collect things so I can engage the mysteries of selling, the playground of wants, needs and desires.

To do so means one has to be in what might be called an enviable position or what is more often called lucky but though I'm a fan of being lucky it's so vague a position, a kind of unchallenged talent that arrives and leaves on the mists of chance that it doesn't really offer us much definable ability to ride with clarity and precision it's waves and eddies.

Because with all the people I see in enviable positions it's always the result of choices, even whilst many don't see their positions as enviable or can connect the dots that see the results of choices made.

But above and beyond choices it's always about money being far more important or far less important than is normally the case and interestingly enough the difference between realising ones enviable position seems always to be about the difference in importance of money. Therefore it's alike the clothes we wear and the thinking we ascribe to those clothes in setting our position in others eyes.

"Adversity is the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then."

John Wooden 

I heard this quote the other day in the movie Battleship and for that alone this Hollywood attempt at Blockbuster success was worth all the other heroic gestures so esteemed by the modern state of the middle American. Why? Because it's not anywhere as deep as it could be, doesn't tell us the whole story, but is a wonderful start to begin describing what adversity even is. Again the clothes we wear.

But I just remembered, I gotta do stuff, I gotta empty my brothers van of stuff and get it back to him so this thought just popped into my head.

Buddha might have said, I don't know, that's it's neither uphill or down hill, there is no hill... you are the hill.

That's a bit silly... but I get it, 

Do what we must or what they ask?

I've just finished up with someone who wanted me to work with her crreating a new interior for her families living space and after about 40 hours of discussions she said that my view of life is incredibly distorted.

And it must be, distorted, because I'll always go for what feels right over what people actually want because the two are often very far apart. I think that's it's all this literature and TV out there now that makes people think they're experts in given fields, or at least knowledgeable enough to know what suits them, so they think they know what's best for them. That's all well and good if they're prepared for the consequences but most people aren't so the job of anyone who is knowledgeable in any given field is to try and ascertain what a person wants within the deepest part of them and come up with solutions that allow those needs to be met.

To illustrate that this person I was working with wanted to impress people and have them think she was elegant and stylish through the choices she was making and if I had done what she asked I would have been paid but she would have ended up even more insecure in herself as the outer facade became another barrier behind which the real her could not be seen or given time to expand within. Just a new layer of protection against becoming what her heart truly desires.

Whereas I believe I saw what she wanted which was to have an interior environment which would allow her to grow in strength because the choices made for seats and shelves and floor coverings were an admittance of the true life she led and that this admittance of truth of what we are is what builds our confidence and therefore has people admiring us for those choices based in honesty.

But not just the honesty of what we are as individuals but the acknowledgement of shared spaces within a family that allow the inherent strengths and weaknesses of each member to find the space to be themselves and grow against and within that sharing of a space.

The trouble with such lofty sentiments of possibility is that I can't explain in logical details why the solutions I come up with are valid because the way they come to me are without a planned and implemented process of deduction. They are just visions that come into my head and feel so right that to deny them validity would be silly.

So now after forty odd hours of being told my powers of observation are acute and my perception of underlying values were uncannily defining I now have a distorted view of reality...

Why? Because I suggested this woman needed to see a therapist. Because in the final few hours I finally met the husband and viewed a dynamic, between husband and wife, that was sorely in need of fixing and carrying on with my work with them would bring a crisis neither of them wanted but both of them actually required.

Now I have to go out with a van load of stuff and sit in a cold carpark in Grey Lynn and see if I can find any other individuals willing to bring me into their lives offering things that will helpfully enable them to be more of what they really are... yup, I'm definitely distorted!

Resurfacing or new foundations?

On my other blog I went on about using a space in Oranga to do various things and sent a letter to the Mayor asking if I could. They said no.

This raises quite vital questions for me which are basically about me having designed myself to do specific things in a specific way and finding the world I live in has absolutely no use for that way of doing things.

It all started a very long time ago but the short story is of being open to ideas and visions that require my skills to come into being. Take this with a grain of salt though as it is my understanding that even being capable of recieving these ideas and visions requires an outlook of an empathic nature that though not completely selfless is moving into that territory. But as I have become more proficient at bringing whatever is required into being.... into being, the resistance of others to those visions has become more pronounced. It's as if my own acceptance of such inevitabilities are completely un-inevitable for others and this has brought me to a point of asking myself why I even bother.

I'm also fully aware that this may seem entirely self congratulatory and that I'm awash in my own in-consequence and striving to defend a mirage of usefulness both to myself and the world... but I realised long ago, as I said above, and have ruminated vastly on such, is that we cannot see what is possible unless we are faithful servants of the impossible... that is to say that the element of risk almost has to become alike breathing... not thinking just doing and letting the outcome be what it may.

And now it seems almost pointless, which I understand, trying to save the world... especially when I'm asked to do so. But I'm glad actually, it's about time I reset my priorities and had a bloody good look at the foundations I've built for myself.

Just on Sunday I was at the City Library... it had occurred to me that morning that it would be a good place to visit, and upon entering they'd changed things around so my initial idea of getting to know the comic book shelves was thwarted as they were not where they were before but that's what librarians are for even as they carry that look of being supremely interested in somewhere else except for where they are.

So after bothering the noble carer of tomes I headed into the labyrinth of streetwise insouciance strutting through it's own nonchalance... well the modern stuff anyways the seems to revel in brevitable awkwardness and the inability to draw properly with captivation of it's audience in mind, alike most post modern art, and I was within the comic book section and found quite quickly what I didn't actually know I was searching for. I found an illustrator who'd done a specific illustration which was an answer to a question I didn't get around to answering the last time I seriously put paint to canvas. As soon as I saw it I realised I had a hankering to solve that particular problem and even remembered the recent questions I'd asked myself which were, in hindsight, hankering back to that unsolved question. 

Knowing then that I was onto something, following my muse, hearing the voice of God, unearthing a future germinating in the black soils of now... whatever you want to call it I went up the stairs to the Art section with nothing in mind except the possibility of older style comics and happened to pass one of those trolleys with books yet to be returned to their warm shelves. One book stood out but upon looking didn't do anything so I walked on and the little voice said go back... so I did, and found what was calling.

Being inspired has never been a problem for me... being bothered is where things get difficult. This why I've come to allow such mystical intrusions into my life... because I'm lazy. These channellings of what could be, and normally obviously so, kind of set out a path that's always interesting and not so much for the outcome we might suppose is relevant but for the irrelevance that churning through such mud unearths. It's like a get out of jail free card, collect 200 bucks, and be back at the start. A covered walkway that stretches ahead and features a playground to play in and when I can be bothered doing anything play is my favourite thing!

But I've got to regard this impetus to play with colour with a realisation that I might be choosing painting to simply put off a duty within myself to give due regard to my last big speculative outing where I filled a gallery up with objects and none of them sold. The thing is paintings take no less time, far less materials and best of all pack down to almost nothing if the buyers of such decide they don't want to own them.

Then again an option slightly nefarious has raised it's head whereby I can pay for my Gas bottles rental and get them filled... as well as replacing my hoses which are 30 years old... at least, and blow holes in themselves every time I use them now, which is a slightly dangerous state of affairs... and restock the steel and make some big shit!

Ok, I've re-read the top and I remember what I'm on about... now that's a pertinant way to end this. I don't fully remember though, but enough for it's relevance to eventually find it's way into my observable reality.

This Molten Coil.

Solo exhibition "This Molten Coil" by Sean Kerrigan at

Pierre Peeters Gallery
251 Parnell Rd, Parnell.

Opening 12th July at 5.30pm.

"Hope for a Long Coat" premiere during the show.

Musics by Felix Delux and Silke Hartung.