After ten years of drawing Kids of Lower Utopia Volume 6 No. 2 and No. 3, and after finishing its last page – I couldn’t stop drawing. I couldn’t stop drawing but I had no narrative focus – no connecting story, just flashes of visions that I thought would eventually tell me where to go. This is the origin of all of the drawings in this series Volume 8 No1 Titled: I Am That – The Animal Ethics of Lower Utopia.
Through the eyes of an animal the sacred and realized awareness of Reality watches and waits. An animal is the perfect answer to its niche – its form is the very shape of its exact needs as sculpted by a million years of evolution. It is beauty incarnate because our criteria for beauty was sculpted by the same principles that formed that evolution. An animal looks out from the vast ineffable awareness of nature – which is our very nature as well. Animals live in a state of oneness with that ineffable nature – to me animals are holy.
It is the incessance of thought which blocks the experience of that awareness that animals live from. The absence of thought is peaceful, blissful. Blissfulness is not exciting, it is not interesting, it is not attached to desires or their fears, it is not good or bad, it knows no past and projects no future, it is a subtle ever present self-effulgent completeness within each of us that is synonymous in experience with beauty. And it is this realization that my work point towards in form and metaphor. I am making small crude reminders of that place within where the heart open outward towards everything.
