ABOUT THE MAGIC KINGDOM

Painting in the magic kingdom seems to be hardly different from painting in the day to day of living. The two are a juxtaposition of perspectives that intertwine and interact and embrace. I can talk about the mundane, the paint brushes, canvas and paints that I use and it’s all still within the magic kingdom. There’s no either or, no argument really, between the two perspectives.

I am not always sure what compels me to paint the subject matter that I paint. Sometimes it’s simply the fascination with a shape, like with a coffee cup. Or a perspective, like the way an insect with human eyes would perceive prickly pear fruit closeup. A composition in a thumbnail sketch has at times viscerally inspired me to transfer that composition to a canvas. In my everyday being here, taking care of business, keeping on keeping on, I have this sense of there being a crack in my mind, and sometimes light comes through this crack: A vision. I try to sketch the vision, somehow create an evocation, a story, with paint on canvas, of what the vision had communicated.

And while working on a painting, ideas, sometimes humorous ones, about what to add will come to me that intuitively make sense, where words of explanation are hardly ever essential. The initial vision undergoes a metamorphosis, becomes clothed in paint and texture. The whole process is one of discovery, of taking a journey into an enigma, where the destination is seldom known.

I love the mystery. Without irreducible mystery there seems to be little or no substance to living. So I play with paint brushes, colors and texture, ideas and perspectives. I play in the light coming through a crack. No matter how mundane or outrageously visionary the subject, the journey is happening now in this time and space. There is a science to the process. In the activities of our everyday lives we help create all our magic kingdoms. And it’s a magic kingdom that gives us the context in which we can live our lives along with every other manifestation in this cosmos.

I have separated my more visionary art into three galleries. In “Stories of the Desert Gallery” the paintings depict scenes set within the desert. In “The Long Dark Road Gallery” the paintings are to some extent reflections on this crazy, mad world, the humor of it all, the perplexing, or prophetic. The paintings in the “The Magic Kingdom Gallery” are the ones that are left. Perhaps they are more clearly expressive of the vision.