love.

due to some beautiful love from (one of my favorite bloggers and teachers) brian today, i feel i should make a quick post for any recent vistors... regular readers will know i've been a busy bee recently, and posting has fallen by the wayside... fear not! my wife and i begin two weeks of art and creative pursuit monday. blogging is included in the list of important fun to have.

but for now here's a taste...

• here is a mandala I made recently:

here is a song i've been really digging... it's a dubstep remix of a folk tune. it's pretty and broken. i bought it (& "soundkilla"!) and you can too over at maxulis.com

(mp3)max ulis - "i don't want you"

here is my little sister's new blog. she just graduated high school and is one sharp cookie. she's a writer, and artist, a free thinker and is just starting out... follow her journey there.

here is the michael jackson video that moved me to write brian... watch the eyes, people. bliss.

oh... and here's an 11 year old graffiti artist she's good! I have so much more to write, about michael, about iran, about all the things i've been saving up while busy working with my hands and my neighbors... but it will have to wait till next week. peace, my bredren and sistren.

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some scanned pages from world travels

these drawings are from my travel notebook in 2006. laura and i traveled to a ton of coutries in a pre-conception sweep including ireland, england, germany, denmark, netherlands, france, spain, morrocco, czech republic, austria, switzerland, italy & turkey. click on the images for hi-res scans.

this page is from dublin, ireland, where we saw the chester beatty library, a collection of rare and beautiful manuscripts. i copied this common ten-sided form from the cover of an old book.


this is a drawing of our view of the alhambra from the (illegal) rambutan hostel in granada, spain. the bad graffiti on this page doesn't do justice to the awesome graffiti of granada.


this page details some of the awesome crafts available in chefchaouen, morrocco.


this is an abstract drawing i did on the terrace of a beautiful hostel in marrakesh, morrocco listening to the prayer calls.


this semi-observational drawing was inspired by the beautiful boboli gardens in florence, italy.


most of the other pages are text-heavy or quite personal, but maybe i'll post some others sometime.

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custom engraved moleskine notebooks

so i'll get to the moleskines eventually, but you have to start with the image below...


after making a grid of vesicas (precisely overlapping circles), you can use various intersections of the grid to create the first ten regular polygons. you can do most of it with just a compass and a straight edge, but i actually found (using adobe illustrator) that one of the classic methods for constructing a pentagon was inaccurate. so i just used the computer to make perfect versions of the odd-number polygons with all of these polygons sides being equal.

i then extrapolated and itterated my ass off with lines between the vertices forming exponentially more polygons (using only equal-weight lines, no fills or gradients, also all the shapes arise naturally, i didn't pick what looked "best") it starts off looking like a few quite simple stars in the pentagon, but by the time you get to the 12-sided dodecahedron, it is a lot of shapes. i then placed the polygons back into a rough mockup of the golden spiral, inverted it and voila! (click on the picture for a much bigger version... also note i increased the line weight for printing, the original has tons of tiny detail at huge sizes.)


so then i submitted it to custom engraved moleskin notebooks to see if they would feature it in their artist series. they would give me 15% of the price, but i would just be psyched to earn enough to get a moleskine with this free. we'll see. note that you can also just submit your design and get it printed on a full size moleskine for like $35...

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scan - islamic geometry how-to

from the incredibly intricate, instructive, "islamic design - a genius for geometry" by daud sutton (one of the "wooden books" i just got) i've looked at some other great books on islamic patterns like keith critchlow's classic "islamic patterns - an analytic and cosmological approach", but this book seems to go more into the construction of the patterns from a geometrical perspective, and while it touchs on some of the symbolism and metaphysics, it is less absorbed in this aspect than the critchlow book. get out your compass and straight edge! (or adobe illustrator...)

NOTE: click on these for very legible 2000 pixel - wide versions.

eight fold rosettes:


making things fit:


self similarity:


muqarnas:

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the alhmabra

god it's gorgeous. the jewel of moorish spain. we visited it during our huge europe/north africa trip in 2006 and took some photos. i'm a bit obsessed with islamic geometry and moorish spain(pdf for a conference i didn't go on but contains info about the period), so it was a dream come true. below is a slideshow of photos i took. click on the photo if you want to read a description or see the full size.

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about the header

so that isn't really a gazelle, it's an antelope (a kudu bull to be specific). as far as i can tell, all gazelles are antelopes (bovidae), but not all antelopes are gazelles. it's also not veiled, per se, it just goes off the edge... peering over with knowing eyes... the face is really quite serene in the original, but the title dictated the crop.

the font is the unfortunately named "bleeding cowboys". it's free from dafont.com, which has TONS of other free fonts, some of which are quite spectacular. i think the G is beautiful and it's cool how the two Ts in "that" look like two horns.

the geometry is based on the dodecahedron, of which one view can be constructed from a pentagon fairly easily. there is a fairly thorough breakdown of the mystical significance of the dodecahedron, five-sided symmetry, and basic sacred geometry here.

i used the dodecahedron because i often describe my various interests as "various sides of the dodecahedron of existence"... which isn't to say that reality is twelve-sided specifically (although hemoglobin and chlorophyll are), but just many sided, and one must observe the facets to begin to understand the core.

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