Above
The sky is forever associated with heaven, rendered in blues - and whites and grays - but always in the mind's eye blue, the color of purity and calmness. Ethereal, eternal, sublime, it is a vast abstract painting and mood ring, constantly changing, constantly out of reach. Though we pierce it with our terrestrial-born inventions, or taint it with our emissions, the sky remains a creation of nature, dependably renewing itself, a reminder of purity and the promise of bliss.
Below
At ground level is all the detritus of mankind, at rest and yet on the move. Pickup trucks roam the streets, traveling bins for the broken and the useless, displaying the folly, the waste and the chaos of our material world. Old rubber gloves, fifty year old TV trays, bent folding chairs, a dairy crate full of rusty motor scooter mufflers - all destined to traverse from place to place, accompanied by grass clippings, leftover bricks, and spent paper cups, going nowhere.
The sky too, of course, is going nowhere. And in other ways these two disparate worlds are linked. The careful observer will notice that the one world often mirrors the other in some way, subtle or obvious. The tarps in a pickup truck bed arrange themselves in the shape of clouds, while the distribution of forgotten objects in the truck-bed echoes the arrangement of clouds above it. Other alignments are more abstract. A cloud formation continues the gesture suggested by a load of cut branch-wood and the dark scene of dejected black rubber boots is mocked by an angry charcoal cloud in a swirl of more carefree cohorts.
But having taken note of all this, the mind returns to the gulf between the real and the ideal, a conundrum as eternal as the sky itself and as puzzling as the curators of these mobile monuments to retentiveness.
Here the connections between the heavenly and the earthbound are made explicit - offered as a curiosity and manifesto to guide others in their own observations.