I have been closing my eyes and spending time inside myself every day for 45 years. I have found a place inside that is a still-point where time is not. This Place inside me has grown till now I feel more it than me. In this sitting each day I do absolutely nothing, I let go of me and see what comes. On occasions very lucid sights occur whose intensity dissolves me, and whose scale is too huge to fit into my thinking. These paintings are my best response to those experiences, and they are almost accurate.
The story occurring in the space between these images is the perennial odyssey, the hero’s journey home. The sublime experienced in the work is my true-north. The sublime requires color, now, so I paint in a careful language of tiny vectors, sculpting forms out of the loving void of space, catching and moving perception with their continuous coxing suggestions. I track the sublime into the dark by feel alone – it is my way home.
I woke up one morning after ten year of drawing “Kids of Lower Utopia: Letters from the Front Lines V6 No 3” and had to paint.
These new paintings (40” x 60”) turned out to be the expanded statements in color of the drawings from “I Am That – V8 No 1 – The Animal Ethics of Lower Utopia.” To me they felt childish and lit-up like Christmas or a kind of “damn everything but the circus” feeling. The drawings of volume eight were silent amazed realizations – these paintings are the celebration of those realizations. Originally I imagined the drawings to be shown with their paintings – (Hiho, to all aesthetic consideration in the face of the economic, because all the drawings went to LA – and the paintings to New York).
