Last week I finished a new painting, God’s Eye.

“God’s Eye,” oil on canvas, June, 2012, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the image.

More about “God’s Eye” below, but first let’s talk about buying my art. I’m painting at a good rate, about one a month, and my storage space is getting full.

You can check out the individual works and the price-list at my paintings page. And note that you can buy prints via this page as well.

Here’s an overview image of my paintings.

Click for a larger version of the image.

Each of the paintings is signed, of course. Generally I paint the edges of the canvas so it can hang unframed, and I put my signature on the edge, as shown below.

Coming back to “God’s Eye,” I’ve always been intrigued by a certain image that one sees in old European churches—an eye inside a triangle. This icon also appears, of course, on the dollar bill. It’s meant to represent the all-seeing eye of God or perhaps the divine light within every object. In researching my novels with Bruegel and Bosch as characters, I got the impression that medieval people really did think God was watching them. So here I’ve painted the eye as looking down through clouds—like a spy-satellite. I made the “skin” in this image pink as a kind of joke on the fact that God is sometimes visualized as an old white man. What expression does the eye seem to have? I’d say it looks engrossed, with a possibility of becoming judgmental.

[Ebook cover.]

Still on the art promo front, I’ve made ebook and paperback versions of my art book, Better Worlds. It’s up to ninety-two paintings now. You can buy a high-resolution Kindle ebook from Amazon or get both the Kindle and EPUB formats, both in high-resolution, from my Transreal Books site.

I have a paperback of Better Worlds coming out in August as well. You can check for the link n my Transreal Books site.

And do think about buying a painting! My basement’s too full.

Our daughter Isabel sent us a link to a video of the shadows of skateboarders. Their arms seem to grow or extrude from their chests, amoeba-style.

[In the Mission at San Juan Bautista.]

I think of a 4D version, with hyperskaters, and we sense their hypershadows as ghostly hologram-like blobs somewhat human in shape. Now now and then a sudden arm or tentacle can push out. The hypershadows are cast, not by our merely 3D Sun, but by a 4D “SUN” in hyperspace. The hypershadows aren’t exactly darkness.

[The obscure base of the waterfall at Castle Rock Park.]

Normally our space is filled with the divine light of that thing I like to call the SUN (all upper-case), and we don’t know it. The SUN shines upon us even during our night. We sense this glow not as light but as the all-is-One vibe of things, the vivacity of reality. That’s what’s fueled by the beneficent 4D rays of the SUN. The hypershadow of a hyperskater is a moving zone of desaturation and unreality. You don’t like being in a hypershadow.

[The East Side San Jose Vaqueros on a Sunday run in San Juan Bautista.]

I’m thinking about a Flatland analogy here. Kids are skating on Flatland. The Flatlanders don’t perceive the skateboard wheels, but they do notice the shadows. The skater shadows and the 3D sunlight penetrate into Flatland. The Flatlanders see these shadows not as darkness, but as a—chill. The shadows moves on and the glow returns.

My wife and I made a run down to San Juan Bautista last weekend, hadn’t been there in maybe ten years. Very peaceful out in the country small town. Checking out the mission, the historical museum, the little shops, and the Sunday bikers.

Great live blues music pumping out of Mom and Pop’s Saloon, but we hesitated to go in and mingle with the partying San Jose Top Hatters, although they did seem quite mellow, as did the Vaqueros, in a different bar down the street.

Saw a historical recreation of a saloon in the museum, though.

And some classic high-button shoes. Very goth, I’m thinking.

It’s amazing to get out in the country, maybe a 45 minute drive from home, the whole pace and vibe so sweet and calm. Beautiful view across the valley to the mountains. Why do I waste so much of my energy worrying about shit?

Clatter, click, there go those hyperskaters across the hypersurface of my space again, our world a Wild West false front, yellow-lit by the SUN.

And the eternal glow’s within us all.

Transreal Books is now publishing quality paperbacks as well as ebooks. As well as our five ebook titles, we now have three volumes out in paper, with more to come.

Be Not Content is a coming-of-age novel set in San Jose, California, in the mid 1960s—describing William Craddock’s experiences as a young acid-head. This is a hip, profound, and wonderfully-written book, a unique chronicle of the earliest days of the great psychedelic upheaval. Be Not Content is filled with warmth and empathy, tragic at times, and very funny in spots, a wastrel masterpiece where laughter plays counterpoint against the oboes of doom.

A mystical underground masterpiece, available in paperback and ebook via Transreal Books. If you want the paperback, it may be easiest to buy it direct from Amazon.

All of Rudy Rucker’s science-fiction stories, a trove of gnarl and wonder in two volumes.

Complete Stories, Vol 1. includes stories from 1976 through 1995, ranging from the cyberpunk to the transreal. As well as Rucker’s solo stories, we have collaborations with Bruce Sterling, Marc Laidlaw.

Complete Stories, Vol 1. includes stories from 1996 through 2011, with fifteen previously uncollected tales. As well as Rucker’s solo stories, this volume features collaborations with Bruce Sterling, Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, John Shirley, Terry Bisson, and Eileen Gunn.

Available as a single ebook or as two paperbacks via Transreal Books . Or, if you’re after the paperbacks, it may be easier to get them direct from Amazon: Volume One and Volume Two.