This sweet rosary is on her way into the hands of a beloved. This one I created with his health concerns, his loves and his interests in mind. These are gorgeous 10mm garden quartz, smokey quartz, amethyst, dragon stones and that focus bead at the bottom is an incredible quartz, lodolite, that looks like it has moss inside. If you feel you might need your own rosary or mala, check out my website or send me a message at azro@madriver. Did you know this is filled with M A G I C ?

“The attraction of art is the humanity held in it.”

Yes it is and I think that’s a genius sentence. I’ve been an artist my entire life and I’m not even really certain what that means. One of my battle cries has been, “everyone is an artist!” and I believe it. You can artfully dress or cook or garden or paint. I think we all have the part inside us that wants to create. For me it’s about adding some presence to what I do. And honestly, having zero concern about how anything actually looks.

What’s been concerning me for a while now is the direction “art” in general is headed. For the last 40 years I’ve been lookin at annual publications in the art and design industry. And whoa have they changed, dramatically. Who cares?, you say! I care. I think we all should care.

Tarot decks are a guilty pleasure of mine. I can hold, in my hands, mini art!, actual reproductions of paintings or collages or photographs of incredible subjects in my hands, flip thru them, be inspired by them, be in awe of them. For each deck I get to be inspired 78 times. 78 mini pieces of art. Come on, what could be better? The trend now is everyone is making a deck, and many are using AI (artificial intelligence or AI from now on here). 

Understanding exactly what AI does is out of my realm. But I am paying attention. A nephew of mine explained it to me in simple terms, thank you very much. He works in the language realm of AI. A computer will never make a grammatical error because we can tell it how not to. AI can pull reference from tons of already written works, it’s all the libraries at your disposal. 

AI for art samples already created art, art created BY HAND, or photographs already taken showing body structure, specific colors locations, subject-matter, you get the idea. AI for art samples tons of images and creates a conglomeration of them all. Supposedly, if I were to paint a pig, and AI sampled from MY painted pig, no one would be able to know it was based on my art. Well yippee for that. Thousands of real pieces of art sampled to create a new piece. Is that art? I suppose having a good eye, knowing color and contrast and composition is worthy, but still…

Do you have any idea how hard it is to make money as an artist? I won’t even take you there because it’s only a rant. Do you have any idea how often my work, my art, my actual art made by my hands and my experience and my time is stolen, given no credit and sometimes made money from what’s stolen? I hear you, we have bigger things to worry about in this world, climate, war, the zillions of grasshoppers overtaking our meadow, but this is my work, my job, my living. 

No, not boo hoo for me. I’m talking big picture concerns here. Is AI ok? I feel, currently, that AI has some incredible applications. Like in medicine it can help diagnose the zebra in the room, those with rare ailments. That sounds like a solid application to me, so yes, AI is ok. 

Should it be helping students write papers, no, I don’t think so. Isn’t part of writing figuring out how to think, how to put ideas together, how to organize? So no, AI is not ok.

Should AI create art? That depends. If you make art using AI, just label it as such. “This art created using AI.” If you didn’t use your hands or your brush or paint or a marking instrument to make the art, or even a stylus on the computer, then no, you didn’t make art. You were skillful telling the computer what to do, you were great at resourcing real art from many places. Maybe you even have a good eye and know what decent art should look like and you’ve succeeded. But you gotta name it. 

I mentioned tarot above because that’s where I’m seeing tons of AI pop up. There are so many new decks. And the backgrounds folks are creating are super stunning. But they’re too pretty, and only slightly varied, and they’re AI. And that makes me sad and now I know why. Because of that sentence, from The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. He nailed it,

The beauty of art is the humanity held within it.

Yes. So much yes! Art like the tarot backgrounds created in the computer are indeed beautiful, but they’re lacking humanity. The humanity is missing. Doesn’t the chaos of nature add some beauty to everything? If all the flowers were perfect we’d walk outdoors and wonder what the heck happened here? If the clouds were perfect dragon shapes floating overhead that would be cool but too weird. So these perfectly perfect backgrounds that are perfect really bother me.

Pre-history shows us that humans used to beautify everything. We’d make a vessel by hand and paint a bird on the side, or protection symbols around our doors or adorn our bodies to show our place in our community. I’m not giving up on art. Messy art, bad art, kid art, all art. Use your hands. Put your mark, your humanity on what you do. Be present while you’re making. Take the time to put your humanity back into your one and precious best creative life. 

Jesus must have been a pretty cool guy. He seems like someone fun to have at the bonfire. I didn’t know him but I did go to catholic (yes, intentional lower-case c) school from 4th grade all the way thru high school. The part I really like about Jesus is how he seemed to mostly be outside and would stop and chat, tell stories, spend time. I bet he was a great listener.

I don’t know about you, but as a kid I was one who had respect for authority, mostly did what I was told (hi Mom!) and took what my elders told me as truth. I’m finding now that the scaffolding of the catholic church is mostly lies. That statement will bother some in my life and that’s ok, I’m gonna do me.

I found out the other day that there were no physical depictions of Jesus until about 100AD. There were ZERO depictions of Jesus on the cross until 400AD. What? How can it be that the main icon of the entire catholic church started 400 years later? And why would the church focus on that one violent symbol to portray the church as a whole?

As a graphic designer since the mid 80s, something I talk about with my clients before creating their identity/logo system is, tell me, what do you want your mark/logo/identity system to say about you when you aren’t present to talk about your business yourself? What should it feeeeel like? Who is your audience? What do you want it to say about you?

Pull yourself back from the image of the cross with the tortured man and think for a minute, why would you want to be involved in a club glorifying the pain, suffering and death of its beloved leader? Why would you want to wear a pendant around your neck, near your heart, for everyone to see, showing a bleeding dead hanged man? Is that really his biggest gift to us, his death?

The hard-line catholics are likely thinking, he died to save us!, to save me! Well, save me from what? This is where the machinations of the church start to get tangled. Step in, original sin. If I had a baby who died a day ofter birth, like a few of my friends did, that babe, according to the catholic church can’t go to heaven because of da da da daaaaaaa, ORIGINAL SIN. Another piece of the tangle is that original sin is because of me, women, females, those of us with wombs, who grow the babies and give birth. The supposedly first woman disobeyed god because of the snake and the apple blah blah blah, so this grumpy god punished all of humanity by creating original sin.

Seriously? I know, nothing in this life is fair, but really? I could go on and on about Eve and her transgressions, but that will happen another day.

Back to the babe wandering around, dazed, in purgatory. If Jesus died to save us, why is that baby spending aeons in limbo, hoping for prayers (or donations)? Jesus’ death didn’t even save that sweet babe. There are contingencies on Jesus’ saving us. Contingencies that were devised by a few power-holding purgatory-wielding men at the tip top of the bedazzled church. The reality is Jesus’ death can only save me if I’ve been baptized. Isn’t this all getting convoluted and maybe even hard to follow?

I think a bunch of men decided they want power over and wealth. Enter domination culture. I think they are threatened by women, our collaboration, working WITH, our cooperation, our ability to nurture, and drumroll…our ability to give birth. Yes, birth requires an egg and a sperm, men certainly are involved. But we women carry creation. If you are wondering about this look up the numbers of deadbeat dads.

Jesus loved women. And babies. And babies who died. And the sick. And the poor. And the rocks and the trees and the dandelions and the rivers. I am 100% certain Jesus would love the trans community and he probably wouldn’t waste his time on which bathroom they used because aren’t we all simply supposed to be kind? Just go pee when you need to, people! Mind your own business!! he would say.

And you should know that I am no man-hater. I love men. I live with them, among them, have incredible male friends. I’m not one of those feminista who want to flip the whole thing. I just want us all to be kind, respect each other, care for each other, care for our children, our creatures, the trees, the plants.

It probably won’t happen but I’m going to put out an open invitation for Jesus to join me at a bonfire. I’d love to pepper him with questions just to be sure I haven’t earned a distinguished place in hell. Do you think Jesus even believes in hell? I don’t.

Right now I’m doing a dive into Neil Douglass Klotz and his translation of the Aramaic prayer (the our father). I’m no linguist, but Neil certainly is. He’s been working on his translation for only about 40 years. And he’s a man. By the time the our father made it to me it had been translated from Aramaic to Latin to Greek to English. And all that translating and putting words into mouths happened centuries after Jesus’ life. I really want to know the original intent.

Which happens to be filled with glorious ideas about creation, the cosmos, about all of us humans being in tune with our LIVING planet, with our finned and feathered and furry co-habitant neighbors who are no better or worse than we. About how the divine is in me and you and everysinglething. No lie. If I, a wombed creature listens closely, divinity is inside even me.

This aramaic prayer releases me. This aramaic prayer tells me that rocks are alive, that god is a verb and way beyond gender, that heaven is not above us and that we are part of a rainbow-filled fanged flying dirt-encrusted living web.

Ameyn

And so it is

Thank you

Blessed be

So be it

So mote it be

So say we all

Amama