Earth, sea and sky are constant ingredients in our landscape vocabulary. Natural elements such as these can be forgotten in an increasingly technological lives. Natural constants inspire timeless images for everyone to share.

Inspired by evolution in people and planets, this artist (who started experimenting with dissolving landscapes into light) now tries wider categories. These could be split in many ways, including 'Trees and Flowers', ' Roads and Rivers' and 'Structures and Games.'

Trees are literally known as 'Trees of Life'. Microcosmic Pollen Explosions and Seed Dispersals mirror major macrocosms, expanding galaxies, stars shooting out into space.

Authors and artists traditionally use roads and rivers to dramatise life paths and describe inner journeys. Landscape always gives us a shared vocabulary for experimentation.

Art can sometimes manifest ideas and feelings we can't quite put into words, especially when hearts and minds are imaginatively fused, as in dream imagery. Art, in any form, can provide timeless catalysts, emotional stepping stones, seed thoughts which any mind can grow on.

Great art often has an aspect of ambiguity, as though its creators were more interested in posing questions than imposing dogma. Think of Shakespeare's 'problem plays’ or Donne's poetic speculations. These can free the mind to kick start the heart.

Combined factors can make art works all the richer when intentions work on inter-woven levels.

Ai Weiwei made a telling adaptation of the concept of the Tree of Life. He played with the traditional vibrant, fecund concept, building up a tree with representative branches from different species from all over China. But these branches are dead. What is this artist making an imaginative comments about? Does human 'success' automatically destroy the eco-system?

Who needs 'realism?' We have cameras.

Images imbued with positive spiritual energy, like Hilma A.F. Flint's colourful abstracts, resonate quietly in the mind's eye. Joyful energy, like that generated by Vivaldi's Four Seasons, can counter fearful energy and the aggression it generates. Art can heal and so can nature. Hospital gardens provide peaceful sources of rejuvenation, like parks, playgrounds and rare, uncontaminated, wild spaces. These are some of the themes inspiring an apprentice, just making the tea on the building site, goggle-eyed at more brilliant architects transforming plans into actions, and alchemically turning energy into matter.

Shapes carry ideas.  Circles represent peace, spirals evolution, and wild splashes sum up energy explosions - as in fountains, flowers and fireworks. Colours are associated with emotion, they feed the heart. Warm colours energise, cool colours relax. Red, orange and yellow harmonies express sunny, land-based scenes. Nightscapes and dark moon light paintings feature deep blues and greens to create mystery.

Where do you choose to go on holiday? Do you prefer snowy mountains or dazzling beaches? What reflects your inner landscape, your intuitive visualisation of heaven on earth? Holiday scenes can provide images for personal reverie, combining idealised memories and inspirational elements, including open spaces, luminous skies, exotic vegetation and picturesque architecture - exotic temples and mosques, tents and bars, happy hotels and relaxed cafés -

Playing with found objects, such as electricity circuit boards (once resting in skips) can reflect our reliance on invisible energies to power our environment. Moveable wires and magnets demonstrate a potential to connect, as in ‘Central Target.’ Children’s toys can suggest playing with different realities or advocating new systems. The red dice and toy animals in ‘What's Next?’ represent our seemingly random desire to destroy other, more useful, and often much wiser species.

In this body of work large meditative works and tiny surreal Games combine ideals with questions. A snail shell and a galaxy both demonstrate evolutionary spirals. Paired down pictures and daft Green Games help to illustrate ‘CREATIVITY: Nature and Us. Exploring Green Themes through the Arts’, placing our relationship with the earth in a wider context.

Microcosms and macrocosms incorporate cells, seeds, flowers, plants, trees, gardens, parks, landscapes, seascapes, skyscapes and universes; a complete cycle celebrating nature.

Green Games

Themes

A microcosmic tree on a wooden chopping board represents global deforestation, in miniature.
Poetic and prosaic objects contrast : solid stone and opaque metal are contrasted with clear glass and crystals - as with our solid bones and luminous lenses.

In ‘What’s Real for You?’ some objects have composite meanings. Worm holes, popular locally, are also found outer space. And there is a hidden harp under the honeymoon symbol to evoke joy, the food of love, like other emotional, or felt elements which cannot be measured with logic.

The Buddhist bell over the three goddesses in Women Evolving indicates how matter can be transformed into energy. Solids can be transformed into vibrations, particles into waves, mud into music, such transformations traditionally symbolised by celestial music, the ‘harmony of the spheres’.

Invisible energy empowers life, as with the IT systems energising this communication. Brainwaves and heart pulses are driven by electromagnetic forces. Walt Whitman called this the ‘body electric’. Such energy blends are illustrated on a microcosmic scale by an electrical circuit board on a down to earth breadboard, like a miniaturised Energy City. ‘Real’ and ‘Surreal’ imagery connects our waking and dreaming lives, like images garnered from pictures, poems, films and videos. Many objects are, therefore, open to multiple interpretations. Some people see women as moveable milk machines, a great threat to innocent males [hence the knifegrinder legs]. But in ‘Woman’ the spiralling egg cup encircling the pawn could signify the most creative childbearing gifts. This eggcup could also be read, [perhaps more ‘spiritually’] as a central, open chakra, and the tiny diamond in her watch face as a third eye.

Game space provides an experimental arena within Central Target, inspired by dart boards and archery targets. A rainbow disk with moveable magnets, wires and symbols lets us play with our dreams and ambitions, focus on what matters most. Because the pieces eventually got a bit beaten up ‘My Sun Trees’ evolved to cater for larger, experimental numbers.

Go, the eastern game originally dedicated to flat land-grabbing evolves here to evoke multiple means of travel to multiple realms. Buses, Fish and Birds symbolically transverse land, sea and sky. But brain coral, poppy heads and angels unlock unmeasured psychic and spiritual dimensions. It all depends on your mindset, as you continually decide What’s Real for You?

Similarly, the logical, grid-like layout of a chess board transforms into a circular format, holistic unity, no longer the rigorously governed, geometric battle ground of old. Similarly, old power players are replaced by new pieces, symbols of the earth’s land and sea. Green Centre’s focuses on central, living leaves. These leaves are surrounded by rings of green, land layers which merge into bluer sea and sky colours. Central living leaves represent the Earth’s lungs, and hopefully a chance of survival?

We are all environmental artists, creators desperately needing to forget short term greed, learn to put earth first. Our ideas and feelings always feed into this shared web of existence, so we need to be ultra careful what we concentrate on as human hearts and minds constantly create invisible blueprints for the future. Thoughts become things.

Experiments

Games let us define our ideas on miniature stages, as we ourselves evolve. Green Games are especially potent now the world is in crisis : we have to evolve fast.

What inspires you most in nature? Suns, moons, stars, trees, seas, flowers, mountains, rivers?
Why?

What favourite colours represent you best right now?
Why?

Share your connections with nature by playing with universal images from ‘mysuntrees.’ Use them to expres/shares your own individual mindscape, ideals and emotions.

Growing projects and environmental links enhance our health. Doctors now carefully prescribe Blue and Green Medicine, as access to sea and land is always ‘good medicine’.

Green Games Collection

A collection of about 30 small pieces. These overlap and so can be split in many ways. Visual miniatures, like poems, condense ideas. These Green Games are part of a wider tradition experimenting with landscape to explore reality. Compare the seemingly child-like and horrifying structural grids conjured up in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘The Matrix.’

GARDENS:

Tree of Life, wire with semiprecious stones, mobile

Tree of Life, sun over animal ladder

Seed Thoughts, etched glass mobile, grape stalk, amethysts

Roots and Branches, illustrating book and charity logo

Tree and Moon, with white gold

Bird in a Tree for Mozart

Paradise garden for Poussin, + miniature building bricks

Minimalist Garden for Matisse

Water Garden for Hockney, blue tiles and prisms

Sculpture Park for Noguchi, ink well, solar panel, game

Sacred Grove for Vivaldi, butterfly trees over mirror

Owl’s Garden, Athena’s Bird in junk yard

Energy City, circuit board on bread board

Tree Centre, toy garden

PEOPLE AND ANIMALS:

Green Dance, paper figures around tree

Family Life, crocodiles

Woman, knife grinder, pawn in eggcup, battery parts, watch, flowers…

Women, clay, chess, plumbing

Women Evolving, bed spring, eggs, goddesses under a Buddhist bell

Three Life Paths, contrasts using symbolic birds, fish, animals and insects

Priorities? – Keep Power or Share Food?

A Cat’s Dream, bird in bird feeder over mosaic

Toad in the Hole

 GREEN GAMES:

What’s next? Animals, dice

Real Players: Birds and Insects [with miniature humans]

Real Workers: Butterflies and Bees

Sky Eye, globe in eye frame, mobile

Universe, metal, lichen etc, mobile

Land v Sky, yin yang design, + set of 3 // linked images, all metal discs

Sun, disc

Light Person, disc, better under People and Animals?

Spiral, disc

Pollen Explosion, disc

Celtic Cross/Town Plan, disc

Central Target, multiple symbols, magnets, connecting wires also on a metal disc

Green Centre, leaves, crystals, shells

What’s Real for You? includes angels, toys, truck, food, brain coral, poppy heads, wormholes, bell…

Play with ‘mysuntrees’ use Nature Symbols to explore personal health/life paths ‘CREATIVITY: Nature and Us. Exploring Green Themes through the Arts’, Amazon, Kindle