The Story
A long time ago late one summer day I was walking home along a paved road carved into a hillside. A message came to me from out of a carved hillside: All of man’s scientific discoveries and technologies are already written into the stars, the trees and all the plants, the earth and all the animals, held within the grace of some ancient, enigmatic sentience. Somehow the message, both strange and beautiful, made perfect sense to me and I just kept on walking.
A few years later in a dream there was a pale blue star that fell from the heavens just before dawn. I hurried down a country road to an open field where the blue star had fallen. The star had broken into tiny specks of ultramarine light scattered in the wild grass. The air in the dream was pleasant and cool in the hour before dawn. As I picked up the glowing specks and cradled them in my hand a deep loneliness overcame me like some vast space between the stars. I awoke to the sun shining through the bedroom windows.
In another dream there was a chemistry lab set within a dark, mythic warehouse. There were a few tables and shelves with flasks and beakers. There were bottles filled with reagents, notebooks and other paraphernalia. The warehouse somehow spoke of scientific reductionism where dark silence could no longer fill life with relevance. It was the beginning of disenchantment.
These messages and dreams, and the disenchantment, became the bedrock upon which I would walk as an artist, though I would not have known it then. I had always done art, in grade school and in junior high I drew visionary pastels that I sometimes took to school to sell. Now it seemed that art would become a journey, with paintbrushes in hand, in search of some enchanted place, a village or a land overseen by some faery queen goddess of terrible beauty. So after a year and a half of college, after reading a miscellanea of occult books and books on astrology or Atlantis, after numerous vivid dreams more real than everyday life, and after all the madness of a youthful quest in search of a natural high, it all came crashing down and there were then only the paintings to create as a way to keep on going from day to day. That was in the 1970’s and most of the works of art that were painted in the 1970’s were fanciful, visionary, sometimes expressionistic, where oftentimes the dark pieces were the most rewarding and liberating to create.
In 1999 I was laid off from my job. At first it was like being told one had stage 4 cancer with only three months to live. But as I was leaving through the front doors of the building where I had worked for almost twenty years I began to feel really free. I felt lighter. I could almost fly. I wanted to paint abstracts. That is how the 2nd chapter in this creative journey began which I am still walking and stumbling about in search on a way back home. At first the abstract paintings did not manifest. Abstraction became a method of expression as I plunged into painting, endeavoring to make it as an artist, or whatever. It was the imagery that came to me, seductively with feelings, a poetry of interrelationships, taking me on a journey. So with paint brushes and crayons in hand I went on that journey.
Today I sit in a cafe drinking coffee, writing this story rather than some sort of bio about where I studied art, what galleries and shows I’ve shown in, what rewards I’ve gotten and so on. It feels more honest to do a bio this way. I hope that this story gives a sense of what compels me to be an artist — a kind of warrior’s journey, a poet’s angst and a fool’s errand — more than inspiration.
I look out the front windows onto Elmwood Ave., at the people walking by outside, and all the cars, with voices and people all around me. It’s an amazing experience and to wonder how this scene will change as the age of oil comes to an end. Sometimes this life will shatter into a thousand pieces scattered across space-time, held within the grasp of complex equations, the embracing angel turned to tormenting gargoyles of pointless time and empty space claiming to know everything there is to know. And I’ll cry out for the angels of blissful, unknowing wisdom to come to my rescue. And I’ll start another painting. And the spirits of Lake Erie will be with me again, or sometimes the ones who travel the northern New Mexican desert or the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains reaching out to touch me in their enigmatic way: sticks and stones, cactus, trees and water. The journey has been, and will always be, an intimate one.
A Method to a Madness
I create with acrylic paints, crayons, pencils, brushes, canvas and panels. Non of that is terribly relevant except in casual conversation. I paint intuitively while at the same working to compositionally “get it right”. There is solace in making art, oftentimes a feeling of community, but of what I don’t always know: Maybe with nature, people, ghosts and ancient cultures. Or distant galaxies. I don’t always understand what I create, and that’s fine. To this day I cannot explain a Totem Forest. If there is anything that I celebrate with art it would be Mystery, irreducible and all about us. Painting is a lot of work with a few small inspirations along the way. And it’s like hanging out with Serendipity which somehow makes it okay.
Totem Forests in the Beginning
I was living in Asheville, NC, not working and wanting to paint a large forest-scape. I wrestled with the piece for over a month, with tree trunks, leaves, damp ground and a deer. And it wasn’t working. The piece fell flat. One day in a fit of exasperation, with no particular agenda on the mind, I shattered the scene and broke the forest-scape into numerous pieces. That worked. Like breaking on through. I felt somehow connected to the forest. And free. I called it a Totem Forest. Why that title I don’t know, but it made a kind of intuitive-body sense at the time. It was my first Totem Forest of many that would follow.
Notes for Down a Long Winding Road
Warrior Jester from the Endless Void (Terrible Lizard)
The initial idea for the painting was a kind of rhetorical question: Could there be a viable civilization without the seeming underpinning of war? War is terrifying, grotesque and riveting. What could be equally terrifying? And the answer that came to me was the “Endless Void” where one’s ego would dissolve into the irreducible mystery of a vast cosmos within and without; therefore, war is no longer needed for those who seek self annihilation through the demonizing of the other. Death and awe. Perhaps no demons, no angels, an Olympian pantheon, sans the warlord gods of the Greeks, for the most part indifferent to the drama of humanity.
That became my inspiration, to paint what cannot be illuminated, only alluded to by assembling a collage of images, via serendipity and intuition, seemingly related to the subject, or perhaps not. At the time I had a thing with jesters, in this case a little bit akin to Shamanism, taking the place of kings. It’s all play, humorous and a little bit crazy. The lizard lapping up liquified time is from a dream I had where an iguana like lizard was walking about in this house like he owned the place. In place of archetypal images the tarot deck is made up of colorscapes. Maybe the jester is lost. . . The woman is the mysterious one. Does she hold the key? Could she be the one to reveal a world without the underpinning of war? I don’t know. I never got a definite answer.
The Fairy Queen’s Grand Opening
The idea, or vision, for this painting came from a long time ago when I was driving down a country road in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The vision was simple enough: A plainly dressed girl (a young woman or someone more ancient than the dinosaurs) is sitting out on a grassy knoll playing a small harp. Her music is invoking a giant, dark disc moving slowly across the sky. It is the color of nightfall. As it moves, blocking out the light, slowly turning, our civilization begins to fall apart. It was as simple as that, an ending song played by a girl who did not seem to exude any great aura of power.
The initial vision morphed into something else. The dark disc became a mandala of the modern age. The plainly dressed girl was transformed into a kind of Pandora/Medusa figure playing a harp, whose song made the mandala slowly turn and a Jester in the Box go joyously about manifesting all kinds of wonders of the modern age that became subsumed into the mandala.
The fairy queen came later in the painting, almost like an offhand afterthought, with her strange and quirky entourage. The woman playing the harp, the mandala and jester have become players in some kind of Shakespearian play all in the spirit of “entertaining” the queen. A grand opening. But then, I have wondered if she’s kind of indifferent. She’s seen it all before, massive basaltic eruptions, mass extinctions and meteorites, and life always most beautiful. Another flowering amongst many. And will there be a last act?
Rockin’ on Down the Long Red Road
There’s that crazy person inside of me, drink til’ sweet oblivion kisses me and I hang by my legs over a balcony while laughing three stories up. No more fear, or torment in every direction. Free at last! To be shorn of this tortured flesh, all the drama, the alienation and distraction. To go to some place past where the deer stands frozen in the oncoming headlights, that rivets our attention to a terrible vision of endless civilizations rising and falling, going no where: Ah yes, Sweet Oblivion can be a real saint.
I am on this road, leaving my own personal armageddon behind, and the world’s too. I am going somewhere and if that is a joke then I know I can laugh too. No, I am not preaching about the “evils of the flesh”. No, if anything, I would prattle on about merging into nature, to hear the voice of some great mystery, from some pointillist Big Bang to sapient reflection, to be a tree or an octopus, a rock or a star. I want to rage, play this song, like some kind of dark metal ballad of liberation, with an angelic chorus in the background. My passing will be like a slight breeze, my song like the sound of insects in the night time.
Together on the Long Road
This piece is less about some time line — being on the long road — than what brings together a moment, implying how we are all interrelated amongst ourselves and all that lives, in life and spirit. That’s the intuition I was having, a psychic, subconscious backdrop of some kind of tapestry being woven from all our relationships, while I painted, which was also a small thread in the vast weaving, reflecting, looking in, looking out from a window. So each scene relates to, and supports, all the other scenes, even the windows that seem to float in space.
Polyptychs
Imagine a vast mansion of countless rooms. Each room is a space, a time, a perspective or event. Like a tapestry, a distant galaxy weaves with an insect crawling up a wall along with the meaning we imbue a clock going round and round. We look out a window and see a garden. Some of the doors are locked. Polyptychs are about this mansion, a collage of interrelationships making up a moment.
Deep Fishing in the High Desert
This painting is kindred to an offhand critique of the presumption that by pinning a butterfly into a glass case in a museum explains all that we need to know about the flight of butterflies. The painting could be a parody on hubris: man, seeking to know it all, dissect it, put a price on it. Who knows. The jester character in the canoe doesn’t know. He’s on a mad quest, like with a clock he can catch consciousness itself, label it, stack it in a museum of his own madness, where eyes go dark and can see only life, like so many mechanical marionettes, from atom to insect to even himself, now dead, easily packaged and sold. And this is how consciousness takes flight! A butterfly quivers in a museum case. The mad jester hopes to capture the merest glimmer of a fancy of flight in the wasteland of ingenuity and turn that glimmer into his own wings of glamour.
But who knows. Maybe the jester is just out having fun fishing in the high desert on a clear day. I was having fun painting whatever came to mind. I didn’t want to take it too seriously.