John Daido Loori (1931-2009)

Link to the NYTimes obituary : http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/nyregion/10loori.html?_r=1

How creativity works

(at least for me)
The late Heinz von Foerster, one of the founders of cybernetics, established the Principle "Order from Noise", which states that well organized systems can only evolve by assimilating "noise", ie, information that was disturbed while being transmitted. It applies to natural and man-made systems, as well as for creating art.
Biologic evolution only occurs because the transmission of genetic information may go wrong (mutations). If there was no "noise" in the process, if the genetic information had been correctly transmitted from one generation to the next, living organisms would still be very simple and very similar.
It is said that the musicians in Jamaica developed Reggae music while trying to play the music they heard from England on short wave radios, with lots of interferences. I remember travelling long distances by bus; at night, half asleep, with the sound from the engine and the musics from the radio that the driver forgot to tune , I would make my own sometimes very interesting musics in my head. I felt sorry I didn´t know how to write music down.
Ideas for paintings come to me in a similar way. Pictures I half perceive when going through a magazine (then I go back to that page and realize there´s a different image there, although I might prefer what I thought I first saw there), or looking at poorly lit images in the dark, or a departure from this same process: seeing faces or bodies in the irregularities of a wall or a floor. This is departure from this process because, to start with, there is no information in those surfaces.
This process can be deliberately replicated to make art, and it would be interesting to use computers to do it: feed them random unfocused images and have them make an image, or have them compose music from random bits of music and sounds from the streets.

Previously unreleased material

More painting

Another painting from the Strange Planets series.

I´ve shown a picture of this paint before, still unfinished. Now it´s finished.

Three old paintings

"Homeland security"

New paintings

This isn´t complete yet. It´s oil on canvas, as usual, and I´ll paint some small changes.

This two are from a series : "The death siamese twin - snails"(left) and "The death siamese twin - caribou" (right).

For the caribou painting I thought of giving it two titles: the first quarter in the bottom (the plants) would be called "Poliamory", and the rest "The death siamese twin - caribou". Paintings having two or more names would compensate for all those millions of paintings that go untitled...

Russian Esquire

I was featured on the May 09 issue of russian Esquire.

A long plan goal for invertebrates and cold blooded animals.

detail:

Quote read recently: "There have been beings through wish God loved me"

("Houve seres através dos quais Deus me amou")

Saint- Martin

Welcome

This are some of my recent and not so recent paintings. I used to have a site http://www.jpob.no.sapo.pt/ in the whole wide web.

Enjoy and feel free to leave a comment.

Climatic changes.

Bride eaten by vultures

Darwin was right

Above are two paintings I did with a kind of a humanistic prayer.
The quote impressed me very much the first time I read it; it´s from
a book of essays by Marguerite Yourcenar.