Art – Page 2 – Mary C Simmons … Art and Word

Quartz: the Series

The α- Alpha and the β- Beta

The Science & Art of Quartz.

Our most beloved gemstone, in its myriad forms…_.Eleven crystalline and 2 non-crystalline minerals comprise silica (SiO₂), though Quartz is the most common form. In our landscapes, in our lives…
Twelve percent of Earth’s surface is quartz, and a full 20% of the whole crust is Quartz.

Geologists have plotted the various forms of SiO₂ over the years, culminating in the diagram to the left.

My SiO₂interests these days, and most of my life actually, lie in the blue and pink areas on the diagram: α-quartz and β-quartz, respectively.

α-Alpha and β-beta quartz occur in all igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rock types. Within the alpha and beta fields lie a seemingly vast array of different rock types, all of which comprise quartz.

*Pectoral Necklace of Senworset II, Middle Kingdom, 1880 B.C.*

Beautiful enough for gemstones. Revered since antiquity. The ancient Egyptians were gifted artisans whose use of blood-red Carnelian—one of the Quartz gemstones—is iconic and legendary.

It’s ALL Quartz…

Trace elements (e.g. iron) produce the colors we see in all forms of Quartz, though it is not color but size and translucency that are the keys to the Classification of Quartz.

From Large to Small…Macro to Micro to Crypto. Size matters not only in how Quartz gemstones are classified, but how they come to display the endless and gorgeous variation in color and patterns of spheres, bands and layers–whether smooth or crenulated. And why we love these humble stones more than diamonds.

Today, it’s all about Macro. Following are a few examples of the flavors of Quartz whose crystals are large enough to see without magnification. Tomorrow, the small stuff.

Macrocrystalline: Crystals are easily identified without magnification.

These Amethyst crystals are an example of Macrocrystalline Quartz.

The crystals do not have to be whole, perfect and complete like these. Some Quartz is quite coarsely crystalline yet doesn’t display the crystal habit of the mineral.

Rose Quartz is a type of Macrocrystalline Quartz that does not form crystal faces, but is composed of many intergrown crystal ‘sub-individuals’

Citrine

Second most popular Quartz gemstone…Amethyst is first.

Ametrine

A naturally occurring variety of Macrocrystalline Quartz comprising zones of Amethyst intergrown with zones of Citrine.

Ametrine cut perpendicular to the c-axis of the crystal. Is that freaking cool or what???

Quartz crystal axes:

Macro…Micro…Crytpo…it’s ALL Quartz.
Versatile, beautiful, ornamental

Carnelian Pendant wrapped in Copper wire.
(and yes, Carnelian is one of the many lovely flavors of quartz, of the Microcrystalline Quartz variety)

Coming Soon: Microcrystalline Quartz

References:
Ametrine   https://www.mindat.org/min-7606.html
Ametrine   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ametrine
The Mineral Citrine   https://www.minerals.net/mineral/citrine.aspx
The Mineral Quartz https://www.minerals.net/mineral/quartz.aspx
The Quartz Page http://www.quartzpage.de/crs_intro.html

Rockin’ on down the road to Enlightenment..

Late last year on one of the social media sites, I was inspired by this poster—words from the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung which reads:

“I sketched every morning in a notebook a small circular drawing which seemed to correspond to my inner situation at the time”

My inner situation was to start the day so splendidly. In meditation. Drawing meditation — a spiritual practice, centered within my own self, rather than the ravages of life in America in 2018 as reported incessantly by social media, news media, comedy media, bullcrap media…

The Mandala Project

I replace it all with Mandala Media—or perhaps Mary Media, though some would argue my inner being, the being whom I truly serve is probably not named Mary. Do our inner beings have names, I wonder? Names that survive our current incarnations?

No matter. Mary has worked well my entire life, in spite of the still, though thankfully occasional, references to nursery rhymes with gardens and contrariness.

Everyone knows what a mandala is, right? —from the Sanskrit, loosely translated as “circle”?

That’s the short definition, which I would come to find useful…but most of us probably think mandalas are a bit more than ‘just a circle’. We want more from a mandala than that.

Man·da·la — ˈmandələ/
noun: mandala;
-geometric figure of a circle enclosing a square, representing the universe.
-in Psychoanalysis: a symbol in a dream, representing the dreamer’s search for completeness and self-unity.

I see. The Universe and self-unity. And the dreamer is… the one who draws the mandala.

That works.

So I draw a mandala every day — with ink and colored pencil on paper. Free hand, but for the inner and outer circles, which are drawn using a template.

The rest is my hand, my focus, my intention.The images of the mandalas flow to me and through me, while I enjoy the patterns and the colors issuing forth from pen and pencils. Emerging first, hearts and stars and squares of ever-increasing symmetry organized themselves in

symmetrical patterns of triangles and stars. The endless variety of possibilities of color and structure ultimately leads to the energy flows of the universe.

Outside, the flowers bloomed and finally, finally I understood that we are, like the flowers and trees, nourished from below and above— with the gifts of the physical earth, and the invisible flows from above, through the energy of sun, wind and eternal sky. Which gave birth to the quintessential mandala…

Tree of Life

The Temple of My Imperfection – 2019

Here we go again…—that moment when you finally realize that all your efforts toward achieving perfection will never be enough.

Seizing the Wabi-sabi

Wabi–sabi (侘寂) represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. -Wikipedia

Probably wabi-sabi was first named for what happens to pottery subjected to the hellish temperatures in kilns, around 2,000ºF (~1100ºC). During the firing, the intense heat vibrates all the bonds that hold the minerals together until they come apart, and their constituent ions and molecules cruise around in a melted bubbly mixture that resembles lava, an igneous rock.

The kiln cools, and the pottery solidifies. Sometimes a gas bubble in the glaze pops at that moment and a little crater forms. Or maybe the glaze didn’t come out with a uniform color, or part of it dis-adhered from the pot and crawled away. Or the tea bowl sagged into another pot.

Classic wabi sabi, telling the story of a unique and unrepeatable moment of creation, fired and frozen in time.

Such wabi-sabi moments manifest keshiki–the landscape of the clay; these imperfections do not in any way interfere with the functionality of the piece, and it would be enormously wasteful to throw something useful away because of a surface imperfection.

One over Infinity

I like to think of firing pottery as a sort of ‘backyard metamorphism’ that changes the pottery, essentially a sedimentary rock, into a metamorphic rock.

I have even made the statement publicly, that kilns are science laboratories in which ceramic artists perform experiments in geology and thermodynamics, which is a branch of science that deals with the advanced secrets of the Universe.

We have learned a great deal about the behavior of matter through experiments that rudely resemble the actual physical universe, tweaked by precise mathematical equations that ignore much of the almost infinite variation therein. Somehow we get close enough that the pieces fit together in rude sorts of ways.

Potter’s kilns on the other hand, much more closely approach the actual imperfection that brought us all the rocks on Earth. And the universe. With a great deal of faith, you consign your piece to the kiln. The wabi-sabi is impossible to know or quantify. There are no round frictionless cows.

Pray to the gods of fire, electricity, gravity and magnetism, that what comes out resembles the vision in your mind. Let me take a moment to calculate the likelihood of that.

One over infinity.

There’s always some wabi-sabi.

A Wabi Sabi Moment with Georgia O’Keeffe

I grew up looking at O’Keeffe art—being that she lived in New Mexico, where I was born and spent most of my life. I’d seen her paintings in books and posters for years. Standing in front of famous paintings in real life—no photograph holds a candle to that experience. It’s not just the colors being more alive, or that you get the true idea of the size of the painting. You are close, very close to the act of creation.
And once, I stood mesmerized in that very moment, as close to a painting as the cops at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe would allow. I could not take my eyes off it: a single paintbrush hair embedded in a stroke of color. I felt as if I was there in that one moment when Georgia O’Keeffe stood before this very canvass. A million brush strokes in her long life of painting…and there’s this one that put in that single, unique moment of exquisite wabi-sabi.

It was breathtaking.

I’m glad she didn’t see the hair; surely she would have plucked it out. I would have, in the name of flawless perfection that is found only as a concept within the part of the human brain that dreams of round frictionless cows.

Imperfection: it’s what makes the world

Not even crystals are perfect; they all have wabi-sabi.

They found this one really big chunk of blue diamond, cut all the wabi-sabi away, until it was perfectly huge. Hugely perfect. They called it the Hope Diamond—hoping for another humongous one like it.

One over infinity. It happens. But it’s all the other instances of imperfection that comprise the whole dang universe. The perfect parts are so few as to barely exist at all.

I’ve never made a perfect pot, never wrote a perfect book, never been a perfect anything. I’ll continue to put it out there, though, as long as I have a heartbeat. I am but a fragment of the whole wabi-sabi universe unfolding.

I just don’t know what else to do with myself.