“Through our eyes, the Universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the Universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the Universe becomes Conscious of its Glory, of its Magnificence.” ~Alan Watts

An Interview with Visionary Artist Thijme Termaat ~ by Jonathan Zap ~ from: http://www.realitysandwich.com/ 

Thijme is a self-taught artist who lives in a very small, rural town in Northern Holland. His amazing three-minute video,  was constructed using simple, stop-motion and time-lapse techniques and no digital effects. It could have been made, as Thijme points out, a century ago. It would sometimes take him several days to construct a single frame and his output averaged one minute per year. Once it was complete, he posted it on Youtube and within three days it was being seen in almost every country on earth and soon had over a million views.

Thijme (responding to my request for an interview): My work is free for interpretation, so I'm curious what you'd like to write about... What I mean to say by that is that I will not tell about my personal interpretations of any particular work, so I hope you had something else in mind.

Jonathan: I agree completely. I would never ask an artist of any kind what they meant by their work. If you wanted to express yourself in words you would be writing text and not painting. Any sort of artwork should be allowed, with whatever degree of ambiguity, to affect the perceiver of it without editorial comments by the creator. Some artists, writers and musicians foolishly (from my POV) respond to such inquiries, or volunteer them, and I almost always feel that it diminishes my perception of their work. For example, I recently found the song Monkey Gone to Heaven by the Pixies to resonate with my imagination. Of course, when anything interests me these days I will inevitably Google it.

Unfortunately in this case, I got an explanation of the song's meaning by its creator, and even though the intended meaning was profound, I was also profoundly disappointed. When an artist explains their work, it seems to collapse the wave function of a shimmering multitude of meanings into a single explanation and what had once been an iridescent and opalescent portal shrivels into a flat and opaque object.

My questions have more to do with the creative process and what motivates you to make the images. Let's start with this question: Many of your images seem to involve actual subjects---people/places seen in the 3D waking world. Many of your paintings involve surrealized elements that appear in your interpretations of those actual subjects. Do you feel that these surreal elements are revealing things about the subject that cannot be seen by ordinary representational vision, or do you feel that you have created an alternate reality that borrows elements from the original subjects and then adapts them to create a new reality?

Thijme: Indeed my work contains a lot of surrealized every-day elements or objects. Mostly these surreal parts function as a crossover from one to the other layer, section or focus point of the painting in order to smoothen the line of sight for the viewer and also to mimic our dreamlike thought process. You cannot hold a picture still in your mind without re-taking your point of perspective every millisecond due to the holographic, feedback loop-nature of our thoughts and imagination. We all experience a constant stream of thoughts. Every thought we have smoothly flows over into another. I'm trying to embed that fundamental characteristic into my work in order to address the imaginational flow of the viewers, so that the experience becomes more of a "ride in their own minds."...

read entire article @ http://www.realitysandwich.com/interview_artist_thijme_termaat

( ( ( One Love Revolution 555... Temet Nosce 247... Big Up to ALL Ashtar Massive!!! ) ) )