Welcome To The Jungle - Bird Eat Bird

Bird Eat Bird

Satisfied for now

Forgotten Still Life

Thou Shalt Not Cage A Bird

When God gave the two stone tablets with his words in form of the commandments to Moses on the mountain Sinai there were more than ten. I am sure of that.

 

And since modern and old scholarship are divided since deades where and who actually wrote the commandments I just assume that many of them were lost already on the long way down the mountain.

The Ten Commandments are a set of biblical principles relating to ethics in life and worship, which play a fundamental role in Judaism and most forms of Christianity. So I have been taught by the elders?

Worship God and his creation!

Do not do to others what you don't want to be done onto YOU !

Thou Shalt Not Caged A Bird! 

It is obvious why!

No matter how beautiful the cage!

Or how lonely you are in this world and how much you need a friend at times that just listens to you!

Everything in this universe has to live according to its essence.

This commandment is so self explanatory that God might have not sought it was necessary to write it down.

Because They Are The Spirit in The Sky

Eating The Sun

A camelia eating the sun.

Explosion In The Subway

An Explosion In The Subway

Mixed Media Art Poster by Chocolat Negro

This is a large poster print of an original mixed media art piece by me.
Printed on matte high quality paper 160 mg in a professional laboratory.
It is printed with Archival High Quality inks.
All my prints Signed, dated and numbered by artist.

The Colors In The Night - A Mixed Media Art Poster By Chocolat Negro

  

THE COLORS IN THE NIGHT

This is a poster print of an original mixed media art work by me. Size 12" x 17 ".

160 mg matte or gloss paper printed with high quality Archival inks

Available on Etsy

A Timid Grey And A Lonely Green

There are four psychological primary colors - red, blue, yellow and green. It is said that they relate respectively to the body, the mind, the emotions and the essential balance between these three. 

By mixing the primary colors eleven other basic colors can be derived. But for an artist's eye there are hundreds more. Call them shades. Their psychological properties are powerful.

Green strikes the eye in such a way as to require no adjustment whatever and is, therefore, restful. Being in the centre of the spectrum, it is the colour of balance - a more important concept than many people realise. 

When the world around us contains plenty of green, this indicates the presence of water, and little danger of famine, so we are reassured by green, on a primitive level. 

Negatively, it can indicate stagnation and, incorrectly used, will be perceived as being too bland.

Pure grey is the only colour that has no direct psychological properties. It is, however, quite suppressive. A virtual absence of colour is depressing and when the world turns grey we are instinctively conditioned to draw in and prepare for hibernation. Unless the precise tone is right, grey has a dampening effect on other colours used with it. Heavy use of grey usually indicates a lack of confidence and fear of exposure.

You can not escape the Colors of Life.

A Small Time Capsule Of The Wankie National Park 1959

Time Capsule Rhodesia 1959 - A Pictorial Tour Of A Beautiful Country

Main Camp in the Wankie Game Reserve. This is a pet ground hornbill, much pampered by all visitors

About my love for old pictures and photographs, you know. My fascination of finding a timeline between a place, eternalised on pictures years ago and the reality of the same place today, I am sharing with you now.

In the beginning when I started this blog my vision was to create a time capsule for me and the ones I share and have shared my life with.  There was a moment when I realized I have lived so much already, have been given so much, received so much, experienced so much that I could fill ten adventure story books for boys and girls. This is a blessing of the highest kind. 

But to my great disgust and even greater fear I had to accept the fact that some memories were starting to fade, becoming not so clear anymore. The past is taken over by the future at a rapid pace. 

And life is still exciting ! Another great blessing. But what of all this would I like to remember ? And what would I like the others that come after me to remember ?

I want to remember pretty accurately everything I had in my life. 

Soon I realized others have been doing it all the time inconsciously. Small time capsules are everwhere, still vibrating with energy in some hidden places, waiting to be found just to be sent on a journey of spreading wisdom again. I see them everywhere, small time capsules created by writers, painters, publishing houses and individuals who have left their memories in written or pictorial form behind for the world to see. They are waiting to be released so that they can time travel again. The whole universe consists of traveling time capsules.

One of the few places where men and animals are friends Wankie Game Reserve 1959

So today I am sending a small African time capsule from 1959 in your direction. May it float across the vast cyber universe forever. May somebody find a liking to it. The time capsule has left a beautiful place named Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia, many decades ago. What it had to say at the time was of greatest accuracy and importance. It is not anymore.

South of the Victoria Falls the road leads to the Wankie Game Reserve, fast becoming recognized as the best game reserve in Southern Africa and, for density and variety of animal life, comparable even to the great game reserves of East Africa. Wankie takes it's name in corrputed fashion from the chief Wange, who ruled over this wild stretch of countryside before the white man came with modern ideas of game conservation. Scenically and geologically, it is a projection of the Kalahari, and there is talk of great a companion reserve being developed one day in Betchuana, across the boundary line which marks the western limit of the Wankie Game Reserve. Such a development would turn the twin reserves into the greatest single area in all Africa for game conservation. ( Pictures, Text by Howard Timmins Cape Town, 1959)

The Wankie Game Reserve is called the Hwange National Park today.

A Thousand Feet Are Going Nowhere - Part 2

The Rope Artist

The Three Graces

THE OLD TRADING STATION

KWA GRAMAX  a trading station that has been selling necessities to the local population for many years in this beautiful old building in the rural area of Keiskammahoek in the Eastern Cape. The doors are closed on this lazy and sleepy Sunday afternoon.

The owners of Trading Stations have been supplying goods to people who live in rural areas all over South-Africa since decades. Still today they are essential in bringing necessary goods to the farming areas.
This is the place where you can buy commodities ranging from maize-meal, sugar, cosmetics, clothing, all sorts of canned food to petrol.   

Just An Old Farmhouse Kettle

BUT LOVED, ADMIRED, ADORED AND TREASURED BY ME.

YOUR OWN RIGHT WORDS

It is difficult to say or write something meaningful or beautiful that has not been said by someone already before.

What you want to say might have been said in a more poetic, clearer and better way decades or hundreds of years before you. No, you can be even sure that it has been said.

Everything that there is in this world has been said already before. And MILLIONS of words spoken by others over the centuries are still floating the universe with their vibrations - attracting alike words.

That is why I often hesitate to write. To find the exact right words is an art and that is the reason why Paolo Coelho is a genius. And why Hemingway and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were geniuses before him. That is why they are different and special.

To find the right words, YOUR right words is the challenge.

WORDS are like gold. They shine through darkness and they have a weight. The more you add the more the more their weight is felt by the ones who give them and by the ones who receive them.

And they have the power to live through more than hundred years of solitude.

They possess all the power that there is. You might like and not want to part with the weight of something spoken to you in love and admiration. There is a chance that the beauty of those words will stay with you until your hair turns white and you are old.

Others stick to you like a bad conscience and you can never forget the pain they caused although you tried. They feel like a necklace of gold that is heavy and uncomfortable and like something of bad taste around your neck.

You say to me : " Just take it off".

 "Just try ", I say.

I started reading when I was a child. I was blessed to be with people who gave me books whenever I wanted and needed them. Other people's beautiful language and their play of words have shaped my own capacity of speaking and expressing myself. I can't remember the number of books I have read over the years. I just remember that I started to love words and language and to recognize the deep impact they have once spoken.

A word has to be looked at and turned around before saying it.
It's meaning has to be understood cause it sways and stays forever and I can't be taken back.

TIME IS ON MY SIDE

A couple of years ago my mother said to me : YOU NEED EVERY DAY OF YOUR LIFE. THERE IS NO TIME TO WASTE. THERE IS NO TIME TO BE BORED.

Does time really exist? Or is it another framework developed by man because man simply needs always some sort of structure. Is it an illusion of the human mind because many of us can not imagine more than one live? So there has to be a beginning and an end. Are we creating time ourselves by giving it the right to exist?

And if time exists does, if we have created it, does it serve us or hurt us ?

What do you see when you look in the mirror?

Years after my mother said the most fundamental sentence someone has ever said to me since my birth I would still take a step further and say : YOU NEED EVERY SECOND OF YOUR LIFE. 

There is absolutely no time to waste, no time to fight, no time for discontent and for complaints. 

By believing this the only consequence is that every day should be spent in creating something positive and valuable.

I do not mean however by that that life should be lived in a hurry and with the pressure and the fear that it will end soon and there will be no more chances. In fact there will be many more opportunities and chances.

But the seconds that you have been given in this life are one of the ingredients amongst others needed to complete your Work of life. The Masterpiece, our own special creation that we should give birth to and that sleeps inside us is created through time. 

I do not believe that we have only one life, I seem to know that we live many more. 

Unfortunate is that we can only remember the other lives when we have reached a higher state of spiritual Development. We remember when we evolve further. 

And then the concept of time becomes clearer and it is possible to understand that time is a continuum that is in fact continued through eternity and our lives.

We will be able to remember all the creative processes in detail in which we have been engaged before but we will also remember the beauty of our creations.

We will have the same knowledge that a tree possesses that has created a sculpture of amber over time- and there is also the knowledge how it is to be inside the amber. To be the amber.

Looking at live from this angle it does not matter anymore how many years it took for one man to finish the Sistine chapel but that it had to be completed up to a certain point...

IN THE LAST DYING LIGHT OF HIS OWN EYES IN ONE LIFE

And when we reach the port of entry to another world nobody stops us or says DO NOT ENTER. The guard  and the waving hand we see is in our mind only.

TIME IS ON YOUR SIDE. SO ENTER

FUTURE BEAUTY QUEEN

SHE IS DEFINITELY READY TO BE THE NEXT BEAUTY QUEEN

Writing A Book Is No Easy Thing

I was told by one of my friends last night that I should start writing a novel or a book. She said it's overdue.

She said also that I should not just throw my thoughts and reflections out into the world, or for the matter of fact into your face, you treasured friends and readers. She said this was to easy.

I have been told so repeatedly. That it's time for me to write a book.

TRUE. I know for sure I am writer. I am born to write because words come easy to me like bees to the honey and I am story teller in real life.

The problem is just where to start. There is material for 12 books. Yes I think I could do twelve or more in my life time. Long big books. But where to start, where to start...............

Would I have been born 500 years earlier I would have spent my life with great pleasure traveling on a horse-wagon through the countryside, pausing here and there in small villages and earning a coin for every story told. Making people believe. Drinking wine and eating roasted goats-meat in my free time. A man of no conventions and no responsibilities, traveling free like a goose in winter.

But I also fancy myself in the orient, in hot and dry countries- the world of beautiful women in veils. I could have done a little bit of Persian carpet selling at the side. And by the way, I would have been a man for a change 500 years back .

And in the unlikely event that my stories should have dried up - there would be always a nice tea-drinking and resting place on top of the carpets in the airy corner shop with two doors on the market of which I would be the owner. Watching the women in their veils pass by would make me more than happy. Life is great and simplicity is happiness.

Which does not help us with the question now how I will get my first book onto paper? I am not even thinking about publishing but to have it in black and white in front of me would be a miracle.

I have been turning this thought an eternity in my head. So now it's decided. Faites vos jeux.

The book will be written. And unlike the tree in the picture it won't take an eternity anymore to grow.

IN BLACK AND WHITE

When I am behind a camera I feel like all the worlds are open to me. Like there is no limit. For me it's a feeling that you can create your own worlds. Far from perfection, but intense, passionate, fantastic and fanatic. I create many things, most of them with my hands. But taking photos is something I can get lost in.

I have captured a couple of beautiful new moments - Soooooo Black and White.

I love this picture and have called it a "A Mouth Full ". It think there is no animal that comes close to a giraffe in extravagance and unusual looks. May be a camel comes close to it. It's also a miracle. That's written in the Koran, a friend told me.

This picture was taken while traveling through the Addo Elephant Park with my brother. The trip we made is special to me because he was recovering after a long and complicated operation. All well now and that is awesome. NEW JOY OF LIFE.

We were driving trough the park from one end to the other on the look-out for elephants and what we saw was the " Unexpected Death of A Great Buffalo" .

And of course a sight that can never been forgotten................

I don't want to bore you with animal portraits but I think this all would not be there if nature and wildlife conservation had not been implemented in the past in many African countries. 

More photos can be seen in my gallery:   Chocolat Negro Flashlight Gallery