Archive for September, 2006

About Mah-Jongg

Friday, September 29th, 2006

This is such a great game, we have been playing it at my house for the last month with my Chinese roommate Ru and my Indian roommate Mandeep (we need to be 4) and we love it. We did play a lot with Ru’s friend Fong but she went back to north china… she was too good for us low level players anyway! I used to play this game with my family back in France and I figured, you know, we must have been playing the “French rules”. Well, we were actually pretty accurate although we had no clue of what some of the symbol really meant.

This is how a real nice old Chinese set of tiles looks like:
my parents’game (137k)

Drawings recently added

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

I just scanned some drawings, a couple of them are already on the easel. So, expect some colors in a couple of months !

Jupiter Death

Fairy TakaeOff

Freeway from above drawing (new)

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

Alright, I had this idea for while now, but it has never been fully complete until this summer where I finalized the drawing as well as the idea. It was inspired from the shape of a freeway exchange while I was flying above France. I find the general shape really smooth, probably because the curvature of the central lines are limited to a certain range. But, what actually took time to develop was the rest of the drawing. I gave the space around the central lines a wave-like pattern a bit inspired from the St. Paul painting of Oleg Korolev with the additional scattered dots to give it a bit of a california 60’s art feeling. I am currently working on a 40″x30″ painting based on this idea. The color selection is giving me a hard time but it’s getting there.

Freeway from above

Space dream

Sunday, September 24th, 2006


I had this dream one night a long time ago; it was so breath-taking that I wrote it down on paper right then. I kept this on loose paper since then and until now, here is the translation:

“From this dream I kept two images and a lot of sensations. The scenario is of a distant future (likely in several centuries).

I am in a small shuttle, at about 300ft above the earth ground. The shuttle is really very small (small one person cockpit) but without the feeling of being hunched up. I can move freely and I have the impression of being inside a air-conditioned and quilted suit. Ultra light, I can barely feel it on me. It just feels good.

Outside it is dark, it’s probably night but I can still see hills around me with bright white lights scattered here and there irregularly all over the hills. They are probably street lights. Right under me I can see an empty freeway made out of the same bright white light uniformly all along. I cannot see what’s on each side of the freeway since it’s all black. This is basically what I’m seeing, the destination of the freeway is fuzzy as the other lights, a bit like a light surface night fog would do on street lights.

So, I do an emergency landing on this freeway, obviously my little machine/shuttle has issues. Without any stress, I land easily and I repair it easily (don’t know how). All that with an extreme effortlessness, it feels very normal and anybody could do the same. We could almost compare this little shuttle with today’s moped. And by the way I do not see lots of commands in the cockpit, everything looks very simple. In the dream I can see myself only inside the machine and I have no idea of it’s shape, I just know it’s small and light.

Then without any transition I go directly to the second picture. I find myself floating in space just above the earth atmosphere. I know that the small shuttle brought me there but I have no memory of the take-off, the travel and getting out of the machine. It is strange.

Let’s describe what I’m seeing. Remember that I’m still wearing this space suit as described in the beginning with a bubble around my head (yes, it is a “realistic” dream). The thing that really made me thought I was in some distant future was my state of mind when I was floating there just above the atmosphere. In fact it’s a bit like taking your moped to go to the beach and have a walk there.

But I’m not alone, there are people around floating likewise at about 500ft from me. The strange thing is that there is nothing else at all, no shuttle, no satellites, just a few people scattered far from each other. What are we doing here, floating in emptiness?

I do remember that I’m stunned by the amazing view of the sun rays fading out behind this stellar horizon of the earth, maybe this is the reason of me being there? But this people floating around are just moving in random directions, and also, the view may be amazing for us today but must be ordinary for people living in such era. The whole social aspect is strange, I have no interaction with people but yet I know they are there, not too far, moreover the behavior is totally unexplained… but I do not seem to care too much.

The keywords of these dreams are simply ‘effortlessness’, ‘comfort’, ’soft’ and finally ‘physical freedom’. It seems there was no limit of where my body would go as long as my mind could think of it, similar to Jonathan Livingston seagull’s spiritual experience.

In this amazing dream, both out of this world and realistic, the feelings from a sensory point of view were so strong, everything was so soft and quilted. Even the view was soft and calming, the weak lights coming from behind the earth atmosphere were so uniform and non-violent. Nothing is complicated, colors were dark and soft, everything was pastel. And most amazingly, there was no sound at all, the silence was absolute. I could not hear anything, not even myself, a bit like being fully deaf. My brain is calm, I think of nothing, no stress. I’m floating there calm and on pause, in complete plenitude, like in a very high state of meditation.

Most dreams are about emotions. This dream was a unique experience because I was feeling it physically. I was someone different when I woke up. We could call it a spiritual enlightenment.”