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Posts Tagged ‘Stephen Hawking’

Setting Course

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on May 22, 2025| 1 Comment »

Setting Course— Headed to Principle Gallery, June 2025

Gravity is so strong that space is bent round onto itself, making it rather like the surface of the earth. If one keeps traveling in a certain direction on the surface of the earth, one never comes up against an impassable barrier or falls over the edge, but eventually comes back to where one started.

–Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

I am not sure that the passage above from Stephen Hawking is perfect for what I am seeing in this new painting but for this morning it will do just fine. The painting, headed to the Principle Gallery for my June show there, is titled Setting Course and is 24″ by 24″ on canvas.

Though from its outward appearance the sailboat here seems to imply setting a course to some distant destination, that is not necessarily how I read it for myself. As it is with much of my work, I see all journeying and searching not as being outward but rather inward.

The answers we think can only be found by seeking outside ourselves are often contained within. Often it is the contrasting and gained experience we find on the outward journey that provides the clarity to recognize the answers within. We find that we didn’t know what we thought we knew, didn’t want what we thought we wanted, weren’t what we thought we were, and so on.

We may voyage around the world but it usually ends, as Hawking points out, with us coming back to where we started– the destination within ourselves.

I see this painting and its interwoven nature of the inward and outward as another form of the Entanglement that is the theme for this year’s exhibit. We are contained in everything and, as a result, become the destination for our every journey.

Every course we set leads back to us.

Okay, my head hurts a little now. Maybe I should have just said that I like this painting simply because I deeply feel its colors and forms and that the boat here makes me think of living a conscious life of self-reliance and self-determination.

Maybe even that is too much to say.

How about I just say that there’s something speaks to me, and I hope it says something to you as well?

Kind of a long journey to get back to that, right?

Like the boat here, I am moving on this morning. Here’s a favorite song whose mood   and title feels right for this painting. Plus it feels like perfect fit for a cool, rainy May morning with lots of those same blues and greens outside the window here in the studio. This is Blue in Green from Miles Davis.

Setting Course is included in my exhibit of new work, Entanglement, that opens Friday, June 13 at the Principle Gallery with an Opening Reception from 6-8:30 PM. I will also be giving a Painting Demonstration at the gallery on the following day, Saturday, June 14, from 11 AM until 1 PM.

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The Singularity

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 20, 2024| Leave a Comment »

GC Myers- Lux Templi

Lux Templi-At the West End Gallery

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

— Marie Howe, The Singularity

Yesterday, I came across a post from about four years ago of this short animation of a poem from poet Marie Howe. The post and the poem had slipped my mind, but I was moved upon reading it again.

Her poem is titled Singularity and refers to the theory from Stephen Hawking, and others as well. The accepted theory is that when a star dies it collapses into itself until it is finally a single tiny point of zero radius, infinite density, and infinite curvature of spacetime at the heart of the black hole formed from the star’s collapse. A single point of immense mass and energy This was referred to as a singularity. 

Hawking looked at this singularity and wondered since this was the end point of star’s death could it not also be the starting point for future new universes that might emerge if this singularity were to explode outward– the Big Bang Theory.

The underlying thought is that the universe and all that it is was once a single thing before the Big Bang created all that we know the universe to be now.

We were all part of one thing.

No, we were that one thing.

That is as simple as I can put it and still understand it. I am not even sure that simple explanation is correct. Probably off by a large fraction, like the final garbled message in the old Telephone Game, where something is whispered in one kid’s ear at a table. They then whisper it into the kid next to them and so on. By the time the message gets to the final kid, the message usually only contains a small part of the original message. I am probably that kid near the end of this process.

 Admittedly, and much like Howe explains to her audience, my own grasp of advanced physics and most other great scientific theoretical concepts is limited. But the idea that we were once one and that we may all at some point become one again is somehow appealing to something inside me. It makes me think that maybe a form of singularity is the goal of all art– both an inward reduction of totality into a single tiny point as well as an outward explosion of this same totality.

Expressions of mortality and rebirth.

I don’t know for sure. This is just what the kid next to me whispered in my ear. If I’m way off base here, blame it on him. 

 The entire Marie Howe poem is below the video. Take a look then get the heck out of here. I got plans to either collapse or explode this morning. Not sure which it will be. Probably a theory on that somewhere.

 

SINGULARITY
by Marie Howe

(after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?

There was no   Nature.    No
them.   No tests

to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
— when we were ocean    and before that

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all — nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   everything   home

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Singularity

Posted in Neat Stuff, Philosophy, Poetry, Video, tagged , , on March 29, 2021| 1 Comment »

singularity4

I had other things on my mind about what I would write here this morning. I was going to question how a law that makes giving a drink of water to someone in line at the polls a crime is supposed to prevent voter fraud. I was also going to question the motive for other such suppressive provisions in legislation being moved into law around much of this country.

But before I could start, I came across this short animation of a poem from poet Marie Howe and I decided that maybe this was the better way to go this morning.

Her poem is titled Singularity and refers to the theory Stephen Hawking (among others) set forth that the universe and all that it is was once a single thing before the Big Bang created all that we know the universe to be now.

We were all part of one thing.

No, we were that one thing.

That is as simple as I can put it and still understand it. I am not even sure that simple explanation is correct. Much as Howe explains to her audience, my own grasp of advanced physics and most other great scientific theoretical concepts is limited. But the idea that we were once one and that we may all at some point become one again is somehow appealing to something inside me.

I don’t know. My eternal refrain.

Take a look. The Marie Howe poem is below the video.

 

SINGULARITY
by Marie Howe

          (after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?

There was no   Nature.    No
 them.   No tests

to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
— when we were ocean    and before that

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all — nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   everything   home

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In the Stars

Posted in Biographical, Influences, Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , , , on April 6, 2018| 3 Comments »

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

–Stephen Hawking

++++++++++++++

I’ve been working on a series of paintings recently for my June show at the Principle Gallery that feature fragmented skies with stars appearing at their junctures. Some are very geometric and angular while some– like the one, In the Stars, shown here–have more organic shapes with more randomness in their arrangement.

Both satisfy some part in me, in their creation and in the appreciation for them I feel once they reach a point of completion. Maybe it’s that there is a meditative stillness in both aspects. Painting them definitely creates a deep sense of quietude for me that I also find in studying them after they are done.

It is the kind of stillness that spurs wonder and curiosity, the kind that makes one look into the night sky with hopes that extend beyond our present time and place. Are we alone in this vast universe or are we the end-product– the flowers, perhaps — of one of those shining stars?

I don’t know and most likely will never know. But I will always have the need to wonder…

 

 

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