Down a Long Winding Road
While out walking there’s this place I feel so compelled to find. It could be a kingdom, a queendom, or some place buried in a quintessential mystery never to be divined by science or the “edifices of religion”. Some place of the soul. It’s where I find solace, a story to tell out behind the Shakespearian theatre of the everyday. So these paintings are more or less reflections on this journey while going out past the backstage, stories without words, where metaphor sometimes seems to dance and all the realistic imagery are like props to the silent and hidden mime of the gods.
About Deep Fishing
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 where by a clock he strives to catch consciousness itself. He’ll label and stack morsels of awareness in a museum of his own making, where eyes go dark pretending to see life. It’s a place of captured consciousness where so many mechanical marionettes smile and invite us in to revel in the objectification of atoms, insects, trees, the stories of humankind and yes, even the jester, now dead, packaged and sold. In this prison of darkness a faint light of consciousness stirs. A butterfly quivers in a museum case. This is how the mad jester, now resurrected, hopes to capture the merest glimmer of a fancy of flight, then set it free and become a butterfly in the wasteland of ingenuity. Perhaps to fish another day.
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.