Podcast Interview on Dale Radio about art and life

http://www.daleradio.com/2013/11/27/dale-radio-season-6-oliver-halsman-rosenberg/

Art Pilgrimage to Mount Kailash (Tibet)

I am in the planing/funding phase of an art pilgrimage to the sacred Mount Kailash in Tibet.
I am offering work on-line at affordable prices to help make this dream come true.
This series of unique hand prints, charged with protection mantras, are available here:
http://kailashpilgramage.tumblr.com/

Body as Canvas

Somehow a side project that started years ago as a personal expression to use my own body as my prime canvas, and later grew to painting on others as a reaction to impermanence (as well as gypsying around the world needing to paint larger than the little pieces of paper I could fit in my backpack), has grown into an evolving art modality on its own right. In my continuing practice of collaboration, I often work with photographers. Here is an archive of this Body as Canvas journey:
www.bodyglyph.tumblr.com

This image © Polina Sirosh/Oliver Halsman Rosenberg 2013

Off to Berlin

Off to Berlin for 3 months for some art projects. Here are my reading materials:

1. Art for Arts Sake -7 University Lectures on the Technical Beauties of Painting 

by John C Van Dyke 1893

2. Dharma Art 

by Chogyam Trungpa 1996

3. Series of essays on the Gong and Vibrations 

by Gongmaster Don Conreaux

PLANET BIRTH

For what purpose does art exist? For the creator, or for the viewer? Does it's essence lay in the act of manifestation, or in the power of the final result? How new is the concept of art as commerce? Can art be an honest transmutation of joy or grief, and still be a product? Certainly if conceptual ideas can be commodified then so can ritual objects. But perhaps this thought is wandering off its path...

Human grief is real, and art (or rather: the creative act) is an action to use this powerful energy and transform (transmute) it into something tangeable and temporal. Surely we can look to the German Expressionists or Picasso's Guernica as historic comments on pain witnessed in the external world. And yet, when the pain is more personal, we can look to the art of children who witnessed massacres, and use art as therapy to process their pain. As the Buddha said: Life is suffering. We can either sit and meditate till we are untouched by the ups an downs of life, or we can use the energy of suffering in more of a tantric way, and channel it into a focused point through the act of creativity. 

Recently I went thru a major grief moment in my life, and did my best to transform the waterfall that was crashing upon my heart into the stillness of snowflakes spinning on my finger. Does the viewer need to know the story behind creation? No, I think not. We each bring our own understanding to what we experience, based on who we are and how we feel and think. Creation is just happening around us all the time, to us, by us, and through us.

This instillation I made at the Sacred Door Gallery in Venice Beach (LA), CA is partially inspired by the mysterious buried ceramic artifacts found in Mexico and Central America (which I had been influenced by during my time in those regions at the end of 2012), and partially by something personal. 

The show runs May 4 - July 1st, 2013. Contact enterthesacreddoor@gmail.com or 310.396.4242 to schedule a visit and for price list.

New publication for sale

The Future Was Here

By Oliver Rosenberg

40 pages, published 4/4/2013

New publication by artist Oliver Halsman Rosenberg re-claiming images from the past with his cosmic script + and text.

NEW WORK FROM TULUM

Besides working on a body art project with photographer Polina Sirosh, I also had time to paint a few of my on-going series of miniature paintings on eucalyptus paper. Here are a few:

BRELIN PRESS

Been busy in Tulum working on new paintings and body art photo collaborations.

Here's a nice little interview I did with Eva from a great German art blog:

http://www.artberlin.de/kuenstler/oliver-halsman-rosenberg/