View allAll Photos Tagged metaphysical
I made the image March 2023 with an iPad mini using the inbuilt Camera then edited the image with the SnapSeed application.
I know I said I would really be trying not to miss days, but I had a crazy past couple of days, and I have also been working on this piece, which took a lot longer than I was hoping it would. This was the most labor intensive image I have made so far, both the shoot and the edit.
I am going to be in Detroit all day tomorrow for a Tigers game, so I will probably have to do something really simple tomorrow.
Hope you're having a good weekend.
I'm still at home, but today I feel much better: maybe it's because of the sun out of my window, my head this morning looks better fixed on my neck!!!!
So I took this shot looking outside at the house on the other side of the road where I live!
Have a great day you all!!!!
August 2004
This may be the only photo in my entire flickrstream to have recieved no photoshop treatment of any kind.
Surreal Portrait V2 Alice
Created with Midjourney
PP work in Adobe PS Elements 2024 Raw filters
Further PP work in Luminar Neo filters.
Alice in wonderland metaphysical paint by Marco Mazzoni and James Jean and Tamara de Lempicka and Rene Magritte
--chaos 10
--ar 3:4 --style raw --v 7 --stylize 250
WARNING !! if you use my prompts, please give me the courtesy of either credit me or at least say: inspired by Irene Steeves. If I find you continue using my prompt without credit I will block you. Thanks for your understanding.
Thank you all for the visit, kind remarks and invites, they are very much appreciated! 💝 I may reply to only a few comments due to my restricted time spent at the computer.
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Update April 02, 2025. Now I only accept new group invitation that allows all media types including VIDEOS!
Thanks for 6,340,482 views 🙏 June 01 2025
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Created for AIA group Surreal Portraits challenge here:
www.flickr.com/groups/recreatingmasters/discuss/721577219...
"Unh, look
I'm a real rare individual
I'm in the physical and the metaphysical (yeah)
I know you need your alone time, that's critical
But I need some of your time, is that hypocritical?
Damn, you know I relate to you more than fam
So I won't sit around and let you sink in quicksand
Look, I know you got million dollar plans
And you tryna build a brand, live a life in high demand
Swerving big b's, your bag got little G's
Gucci down to the socks like Biggie and Little Ceas'
Let's hit the Maldives and hide behind palm trees
Little red wine, weed, and a calm breeze
Cause baby, you been living life inside a bubble
When the last time you had somebody hug you?
Hold up, when the last time you had somebody love you?
Hold up, when the last time you love someone who love you?"
Strictly speaking doctrinal knowledge is independent of the individual. But its actualization is not independent of the human capacity to act as a vehicle for it. He who possesses truth must none the less merit it although it is a free gift. Truth is immutable in itself, but in us it lives, because we live.
If we want truth to live in us we must live in it.
Knowledge only saves us on condition that it enlists all that we are, only when it is a way and when it works and transforms and wounds our nature even as the plough wounds the soil.
To say this is to say that intelligence and metaphysical certainty alone do not save; of themselves they do not prevent titans from falling. This is what explains the psychological and other precautions with which every tradition surrounds the gift of the doctrine.
When metaphysical knowledge is effective it produces love and destroys presumption. It produces love, that is to say the spontaneous directing of the will towards God and the perception of "myself" - and of God - in one's neighbour. It destroys presumption, for knowledge does not allow a man to overestimate himself or to underestimate others. By reducing to ashes all that is not God it orders all things.
All St. Paul says of charity concerns effective knowledge, for the latter is love, and he opposes it to theory inasmuch as theory is human concept. The Apostle desires that truth should be contemplated with our whole being and he calls this totality of contemplation "love".
Metaphysical knowledge is sacred. It is the right of sacred things to require of man all that he is.
Intelligence, since it distinguishes, perceives, as one might put
it, proportions. The spiritual man integrates these proportions into his will, into his soul and into his life.
All defects are defects of proportion; they are errors that are lived. To be spiritual means not denying at any point with one's "being" what one affirms with one's knowledge, that is, what one accepts with the intelligence.
Truth lived: incorruptibility and generosity. Since ignorance is all that we are and not merely our thinking, knowledge will also be all that we are to the extent to which our existential modalities are by their nature able to participate in truth.
Human nature contains dark elements which no intellectual
certainty could, ipso facto, eliminate...
Pure intellectuality is as serene as a summer sky - serene with a serenity that is at once infinitely incorruptible and infinitely generous.
Intellectualism which "dries up the heart" has no connection
with intellectuality.
The incorruptibility - or inviolability - of truth is bound up neither with contempt nor with avarice.
What is man's certainty? On the level of ideas it may be perfect, but on the level of life it but rarely pierces through illusion.
Everything is ephemeral and every man must die. No man is
ignorant of this and no one knows it.
Man does not always accept truth because he understands it; often he believes he understands it because he is anxious to accept it.
People often discuss truths whereas they should limit themselves to discussing tastes and tendencies ...
Acuteness of intelligence is only a blessing when it is compensated by greatness and sweetness of the soul. It should not appear as a rupture of the equilibrium or as an excess which splits man in two. A gift of nature requires complementary qualities which allow of its harmonious manifestation; otherwise there is a risk of the lights becoming mingled with darkness.
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Frithjof Schuon: Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts
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Quoted in: The Essential Frithjof Schuon (edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr)
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Image: The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins - William Blake
“Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men.” * Giorgio de Chirico – Artist.
I love this quote, and you’ll now see why I borrowed part of this title from the self-designated Metaphysical Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). Even the most mundane of scenes may well have something of a revelation in it for the sensitive soul. Surely that’s what makes YOU choose YOUR favourite subjects: nature, landscape, wildlife, city streets, rural life. It’s a genre you connect with PERSONALLY. It resonates with YOU. This is what makes us want to pick up a camera. Take the photos YOU want (not what you think others will like or might get Explored) and you’ll find the kind of people who really will connect with you.
Is there a story in this photograph of a darkening alley, a light in the window, no other person around except the observer (photographer)? Does the colour create a mood? Is it melancholic? It’s why some people look at a picture and will see nothing special, and others stand back and have an A-Ha moment. Of course the viewer needs to take more than two seconds to really look – not common on social media these days.
The quintessential Twentieth century American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), realist and promoter of “straight photography”, may not have been as mystically inclined as de Chirico, but he also believed he was an artist with something to say. What sets the artist apart in photography (or any art, including literature - because writers must be great observers too) was for Evans “the hungry eye”:
“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
Evans may not have been the intellectual artist that di Chirico was, but he believed in photography’s power in a way not unlike this other quote from de Chirico:
“Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life.”
Indeed. The fundamental reason why human beings create art (although Bower birds also create artful nests) is to discover meaning. But like life itself, the creation of art is a process, a journey and a pilgrimage. The danger in photography is to miss the forest for the trees. We are often such inveterate collectors of “things” (animate and inanimate) in our photos that we fail to see the connections BETWEEN our images.
One of the tasks I have been consciously working on in my Flickr page is to create real links between my images as a curator might in a museum. It takes me as much time to choose when and where to post a photo on my page as it does to process them. Nothing is random and certainly not chronological. Why? Because those links will very often reveal why it is we do the kind of photography we do. What we are trying to say, who it is we might be trying to communicate with through our pictures. Why bother? Well it’s every individual’s choice, but as Walker Evans rightly said, “(We) are not here long”.
“Only connect,” E.M Forster said in his novel “Howard’s End”. In that is the secret and mystery of this life and the reason why we all do photography and art (whether acknowledged or not). De Chirico and Walker Evans would have agreed on that.
Explore: 8-27-09 Thank you Flickr friends.
This photograph makes a point about life. It illustrates how when we focus too closely on one thing in life, the rest of life often becomes a blur. Focusing ourselves in the "here and now" is a good thing, but giving attention to one thing and excluding everything else can be perilous. In this photograph's case, a sharp close-up focus produces a beautiful bokeh blur in the background. Best seen in large size view.
Persimmon Vase
Esercitazione metafisica nella serie delle tazze
Exercise of metaphysics in the set of cups
Copyright Corrado Riccòmini
Waterfalls beneath a very old arched bridge at Palaeokaryá, near Trikala, Greece.
There is a dreamy, emotive element emerging from the scenery, despite the winter weather. The clear waters of Portaïkós river can inspire and cleanse…
The scenery reminds us of a poem written by the romantic as well as metaphysical poet of the 17th century:
“With what deep murmurs through time's silent stealth
Doth thy transparent, cool, and wat'ry wealth
Here flowing fall,
And chide, and call,
As if his liquid, loose retinue stay'd
Ling'ring, and were of this steep place afraid;…”
—Henry Vaughan (The Waterfall)
... am Ende des Weges, ein ganz besonderes Licht, und dort wollen wir hin ! Dieses Licht wird zwar nicht das vielbeschriebene "Licht am Ende des Tunnels" sein - aber ganz sicher wird es unser Gemüt beglücken und erwärmen ! Möge jeder von euch solch ein Licht in greifbarer Nähe haben !
... at the end of the road, a very special light, and there we want to go ! This light will not be the much-described "Light at the end of the tunnel" - but certainly it will make our minds happy and warm ! May each of you have such a light within reach !