Enchantment

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, 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, even in the world all around me, where often times a light comes through: A vision or a riddle. Through these cracks I’ll sketch the riddles. Sometimes an evocation happens, a story, with paint on canvas, a perspective for the vision.

And while working on a painting, ideas, sometimes humorous ones, about what to add will come to me that intuitively make sense. In those moments words of explanation are a distant murmuring. 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.