Me | Badlands | South Dakota | Summer 1997 | Photo by Ryan

I give you one of my flaws as an artist: I have no pedigree. I haven’t studied with any famous artists (although I’ve met a few). I can’t tell you any stories about how such-and-such the Great Master came into my studio late at night, declared I was doing it all wrong, and then proceeded to show me how to do it right. I haven’t attended any prestigious art schools. (Although I’ve lived near them!) My paintings are owned by only a few collectors with any notoriety (though I’m not going to say whom for the sake of privacy) and so far my work has yet to show up in any museums. I fall into that icky grey area for collectors and galleries alike: “talented but self-taught”. It bothers me at times that I get pigeon-holed and judged in this way and feels like a prejudice – a strike against me – as it comes up even within my own ‘scene’. While the art world of LA has it’s own cliquey snobbery and it’s LA Schools of Thought which I will likely never be assimilated into – the David Hockney/Baldessari hub for instance – this visionary art community has it’s own cliques and circles which galleries do take note of and, in that community, I am at times still sort of disregarded because of my lack of schooling, lineage, etc.

What I find interesting is that the movements which gave birth to this art of the inner world – the early modern art movements of Impressionism, Futurism, Surrealism – all eschewed the academy as it was. They were seeking to create art for arts sake and explore beauty as it is. They were more interested in the dialogue that the artist has with life than the dialogue between artist, academy and art critic. In time however – through the 40′s and 50′s – the ‘academy’ and the world of art criticism adopted and co-opted the movements for their own. Eventually, this Contemporary Art that one sees glorified in too many museums became the norm. These days, the fact that the artist who painted the large panels just one color attended some art school and studied with someone who also had some pedigree themselves and who had already been deemed notable by the academy suddenly imbued those solid color panels with some mystic sense of importance and lineage, even if that lineage is full of shit. If the panels were just presented by Joe Schmoe Nobody then the ‘art world’ at large would’ve laughed them off.

Yet, to be honest, if the artist had perhaps not had any schooling but had instead had some deep revelation, had worked through multiple demons, had their lonely nights of solitude, and simply decided, off in non-art creation, to paint these large canvases and simply gave personal reasons for their coming into being… I think I’d pay attention a bit more.

Me – I left college after two years and it wasn’t even art school. My biography on my website sort of glosses over that whole bit. The short of it: my pragmatic parents, living in coastal suburban Connecticut, a world of yards and nine to five jobs, worried that I wouldn’t get a good job if I skipped out on the important liberal arts education and instead went to art school. At the age of seventeen, the middle child, and ultimately not entirely sure what I wanted, I ended up agreeing with my high school guidance counsellor in a fit of I-could-care-less and found myself enrolling at Syracuse University in upstate New York.

There, amongst an entire enclave of not fitting in or knowing what they were doing, I was blessed with a couple of surprise gifts. For one, as a student with a work-study arrangement, I got a job in my second year working in the slide library of the Fine Arts department in the main library. At that time – this was 1995 and the internet still had yet to be of much use – the library had an extensive collection of slides of seemingly every important work of art, photography, sculpture, and architecture that had come out of the Western world dating back to pre-Renaissance times. Lucky me, I got to sit at a typewriter and type onto little labels the name, date, etc, for each slide. Oh, god, was it tedious. I wasn’t much good at typing either, all things considered. Still, after the labeling was done, there was the organizing. People would take slides out (presumably for art classes which I never got to attend) and I would put them back in the drawers upon drawers of slides. I could sit at a light box and study all of them. I could look at them with a magnifying glass or a small projector that you hold up to your eye. It was magical and I would get lost in them for hours. I saw everything and was able to piece together the dialog that art had had with itself for the past thousand years – from Le Corbusier to Gehry to Kandinsky to Pollack to Goya to Da Vinci to all and everyone.

It was in those days that I began to incorporate the kaleidoscopic nature of cubism and futurism with the dreamy associative qualities of surrealism while sticking to the psychedelic spiritualism that I knew so well. The echoes that the images left in my mind found their way through my meandering pencil and sometimes rather addled vision.

Another thing which offered a vast amount of inspirational fodder were the studies in comparative religions during my second year of school. Syracuse had, at that time anyhow, a noteworthy Department of Religious Studies. Houston Smith taught there which gave it some weight in the academic world. Mr. Smith (Dr.?) was a scholar of comparative religions which is the study not just of religions as institutions and the histories thereof but also of the archetypal human spiritual experience for which religions become a framework. Through the focus in comparative religious studies I was able to gain some understanding and perceptual grounding for my own personal experiences as well as begin to understand the more archetypal human experience as it related to ‘spirit’.

My doodlings, my fledgling paintings, all reflected these thoughts and inquiries. In my second year of college I painted my first ‘great’ painting and called it ‘Surrender‘ (I think I wrote about it here another time). I painted it with acrylics because, I think, I’d started painting with water colors years before and understood the water/wash techniques. Besides, oils took longer to dry, required more pieces to their puzzle, and, to a poor college student, seemed to cost a fair bit more. While painting that piece, I had this experience: A book opened up inside my head and it flipped through pages upon pages of artwork that I had apparently created and it was my life and, I’m not kidding, a voice in my head sort of said or simply resonated – “you can do this for the rest of your life if you want. You just have to give away everything you have, leave school, trust in the way and it will all open up for you.”

Whoa.

By that time, it was around late January of my second year I think, I had moved off-campus claiming to the housing administration that the dorm lifestyle was impeding my flow which, perhaps, it was. I’d spent my first year in an incredibly debaucherous haze. The highs and lows were sort of startlingly self-destructive and yet, not entirely unpredictable, considering that I was caught between trying to please my parents, experiencing some sense of freedom for the first time, not sure what the hell I was doing, and trying to figure out who I was anyhow. My roommate that first year had left school after the first semester and I was never assigned a new one so I had a large room and a lot of everything else. My grades plummeted. My artwork dawdled and grew and, in copious sketchbooks, poured out of me. There were a lot of hangovers, a lot of long crazy nights, a lot of everything that wasn’t school work. So, at the time of painting ‘Surrender’ in my second year at school, I had found a small community of hippie types, was living with a friend and my girlfriend who was a few years older than me who also had a year and a half old son and we lived in a house in a crummy neighborhood near campus that was a mix of students and broken homes and I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

Come summer, that experience during Surrender was nagging at me. Because my parents had agreed that after two years of ‘liberal arts’ I could pursue art school, I’d gone to see someone at Syracuse’s School of Art. The woman I talked to suggested that I look into pattern design (Northeasterners are so pragmatic!) and I was left feeling a bit disappointed. I had vision! Drive! I wanted to make and create! I didn’t want to get lost in a sweatshop designing upholstery fabric! So by summer, I was living in Syracuse still, working a job at a book bindery. I was in an unhealthy relationship. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. All I saw was a tangential downwards spiral that continued to pull me away from any real goal – from my path, whatever that may be.

So I did it – I listened to the voice. I left school. I gave away almost everything I had. I moved back to Milford, CT, where I’d grown up. I cried a bit when I told my parents that I wouldn’t be going back to school the following year. Ever practical, they suggested that I look into trade schools. I felt I had disappointed them – I am the oldest son and my dad, the oldest in his family, had never gone to college nor had any of his siblings. There is a certain amount of pride that I knew I’d never be able to fulfill. No, I said, I would never be going back to school. That’s what made me sad – that they would never get to see me graduate. Well that surprised them a bit but they didn’t push it. While they told me that I was on my own (fair enough) they also knew they wouldn’t be wasting any money on school. Maybe they even saw it as saving two years worth of tuition! In any case, I got a job bagging groceries at a grocery store in suburban Connecticut. If I told you it was amazing, I would be lying.

But I had friends, you see, and I have always been able to count on a beautiful synchronicity with my friends and my community in ways that I can never fully articulate. A good community is one that seems to respond to you when you haven’t even reached out to it. As someone who didn’t have much in the way of friends through grammar school, I learned to not take that brotherhood of friendship for granted. So my friend Ryan called me up and said he’d been living in Vermont the past winter, having left school (he has since gotten his PhD in mathematics) and did I want to join him and some others and spend the winter living in a house at a ski mountain, working, skiing, partying, skiing, painting (if that was my thing) etc?

Of course I would.

So that was that. It surprised my parents a bit – how quickly I got swept up my a new boat but that was just the beginning of many years of flowing journeys and magical moments and long lovely interludes. But one way or another the fact is: something in me said I should go paint and so I did.

That’s the story of my pedigree – my early training. What happened after Vermont? Well, there was a summer of cross country back packing and traveling and then another winter of skiing, then moving into the countryside of Northern Vermont rather semi-permanently. There were lots of parties, lots of painting, lots of walking in the woods, then more travel, lying on beaches, then something else, met lots of people, then another thing, then yoga and meditation, more parties, more travel, another thing and another thing, lots and lots and lots of painting and drawing, and eventually I was in California rather regularly and eventually SoCal caught me and I met this girl and we got married and, fifteen years later, here I am.

I truly feel that a great painting is not painted with concepts and rigorous research but is instead painted with experiences. I never had anyone tell me how to paint. I taught myself. I studied old masters. I studied not-so-old masters. I went out and practiced seeing. I sat alone on hillsides for hours just looking at the light. I tasted horizons and studied gradations. I looked inside my mind and studied light and poked it and prodded it and pushed through it. I learned to apply what I saw to my work. I got it wrong. I did it again. I got it wrong. I did it again. I got a bit better. I did it again. And on and on and on. Until now.

I paint. I love to paint. Some of my highest most sublime moments have been had while painting. Painting, not a methodology or an academy, not a who’s who of name-dropping – Painting is the path. How do you make truly great art? Simply by practice- every day, every night, in your mind, in your life, and on the canvas.

I’ll tell you where the four winds dwell,
In Franklin’s tower there hangs a bell,
It can ring, turn night to day,
It can ring like fire when you loose your way.
- Robert Hunter

It’s all about ringing that bell. THAT is what I am here for.

Around 2am I usually just can’t paint any more. Sometimes it’s a tad later. Sometimes a tad earlier. But usually it’s about five or six hours in and my hand is cramped and my back is aching and my eyes are starting to blur and my brushstrokes start to lose their precision. The good things is that once I get like that I usually feel pretty good about my work for the night. It means that I covered a lot of ground. Painting is about ‘the process’ as much as ‘the product’. Sometimes, it’s just a lot of blanks to fill in. You see, the story is written. The path is clear. I’m just following a dotted line that leads to an inevitable conclusion. There are nuances to be explored, and colors and lines to be enunciated but the gist of the piece – this piece that I’m working on right now anyhow – was decided long ago. I am merely completing the vision.

While I paint, my mind wanders through many worlds and my heart travels through multitudinous emotions the way one might try on different outfits. And there are pure zen moments where I’m not thinking about anything. Or elated loving moments where my heart is suddenly sort of glowing. Don’t dwell on it, though! Such feelings are mere feelings and as ephemeral as the clouds. But I do appreciate those moments. It never hurts to simply center one’s sense of consciousness in the center of one’s chest instead of in the center of the head, where we tend to look out at the world from.

O painting, it has taught me so much – so many little things that apply to my life. So many big things that have opened up inside me – grand a-has! – sublime epiphanies – eternal love – sweetly understood connections.

Here are some thoughts on painting that have tended to have metaphorical meanings to my life:

1. The color on your palate will not be the color on the canvas. That color, so carefully mixed, will likely end up looking ten shades different once you place it between the blue and the orange. Is that the color we were looking for? What thoughts do we have that are actually incongruous with reality?

2. The epiphany does not always occur when one is painting the representation of the eternal light. Most times, it is when one is in the corners, the crevices, the shadows, working out the details, trying to understand the mystery.

3. Be prepared for the unexpected. Go with it. It might lead somewhere great. However, always be prepared to completely disregard it. Sometimes the great tangent leads only to distraction. Which leads us to…

4. Sometimes, all of your hard work leads to an object that needs to be one inch to the left. Or an entire field of color that is a shade too dark. Or an entire array of minuets who must be two inches higher. Or whatever. In any case – sometimes, after five hours of work, you might step back and say: I did it wrong. If you don’t paint over it, if you don’t take the time to do it right then you will always look at it and know that the painting wasn’t quite what it could have been. And if you know this, then so will the whole world, whether anyone can put their finger on it or not.

5. When you get over the self-criticism, and do away with the self-doubt, you can create a sense of beauty that soars. How do you overcome these things? By practice. By showing up. By allowing all the voices to have their say but, in the end, following only your bliss.

6. Finally, few great paintings were ever created overnight. The painters of the greatest paintings lived their entire lives before them. They laughed with them. They cried with them. They curled up inside them. They burst out through them. They were transformed by them. Yet, we do not paint for just ourselves. We live our lives through our art in order to allow ourselves to be the shining lights that we are. In this way, by being that living art, we can be a catalyst of beauty.

To a true artist, the work comes as naturally as the breeze or the shine of the stars. Walls block the breeze from reaching our skin. Walls block the shine of the stars from illuminating our gaze. By breaking down the walls that hold back that flowing nature, we can reach deeper depths and higher heights and great NOWs.

There is a story of a bird wearing down a mountain by passing over it once every hundred years with a piece of silk. This is a long time. Think of your painting process like that. Every day, every hour, every minute, that bird is passing over that mountain. It is wearing down those heaps of self-criticism, of self-doubt, of fear of whatever, and every day the sunrise on the other side of that mountain is revealed just a bit more.

Occasionally we may burst through that mountain with heaps of dynamite. The heaps of dynamite are only successful if we are open to allowing it to do it’s work. How do we become open to that? By every day allowing for that bird to fly over the mountain. By showing up.

If we complete all the little details of the painting and bring them to their highest height, then the grand thing of the painting will be the absolute grandest thing. (until we paint the next painting. And the next painting.)

In the end, we are maybe just painting the toenails of eternity with reflections of itself. There is nothing wrong with that, especially if we do it with love.

At some point, somewhere, I read something about Surreal art and it’s propensity for delighting in the erotic, the absurd, and the bizarre. Maybe it was Wikipedia… In any case, the truth is – Surrealism, as an art form, tends towards the erotic and the absurd. Was a painting in the Surrealist vein meant to make any sense? Or is it meant to simply jostle forth a free association of patterns, concepts, and ideas from the subconscious – placing a seemingly randomly associated sequence of images together, allowing the viewer to stitch them into some sensible relationship, a sort of Rorschach test in paint. I think that if the piece were “directed” towards some conscious goal or had too much consideration given to composition, then it would no longer be a mapping of that subconscious void space. I think that this is why Dali was ultimately ousted from the Surrealist Group – he began to try to direct that inner eye.

I think it a wondrous thing to paint the randomness as it arrives and kill of the self-editor that tries to squash our visions. However, I also think it is also a wonderful thing to be able to direct the vision and work with it – lead forwards without getting distracted by the swarming fetishes and the fireworks throwing cavalcade.  Hand in hand, you can allow it to lead you, the artist, to the highest point you can imagine. Every corner, each nuance, is a chance to pull the painting higher, deeper, and into more profoundly illuminating realms.

Let’s look at Dali’s work over the span of his life as a painter, as the psychoanalytical quality of his work from the 20′s and 30′s moved towards motifs inspired by science, religion, and the culture around him (while still of course being mixed with his own distinct style). One can see how he chose to start “free-associating” less and instead began to consciously use the tools he had, as well as the talent, vision, and momentum, to open up new worlds. His work however did retain those absurd and erotic qualities that were the hallmarks of early surrealist painting. His paintings also round off, so to speak, at their peaks with Christian motifs and images of Gala – she is always there, at the climax of each piece. In this way, I think, Dali could not break through his own mental constructions.

I feel that, in the time that followed the peak of Dali – in the daliances of psychedelic art that then matured into todays more spiritually minded vision – we can see elements this directed inner eye. However, I think that the work that I find most inspiring is that which seems to have a very grounded sense to it, that develops it’s darkness as much as it’s light – work that flirts with randomness and free association while maintaining a vision and clearly expanding on it.

In my own work, while there is, at times, a free associative quality about it, I try to push each angle, each curve, in the direction that is, in my opinion, the most illuminated of visions possible. This inevitably leads, I think, towards an art that is spiritual in nature. In the end, I am not interested in expressing the absurd or the more deeply erotic or the bizarre convolutions of my mind in my work. In the reveling in dark and depraved corners and neuroses, one can quickly get hypnotized, succumb to the ego reflections, and get lost in the sidelines. I want, in my art, to follow each piece to it’s highest possible outcome – in so much as I can pull that off anyhow.

There is a ‘but’ though. But!

This is not to say that all of that absurdity doesn’t arise in my mind. It’s all in there, writhing and forming and distracting. And this is not to say that there is no value there. There IS value in the sidelines. Every piece is just as important as the last. What I mean to say is: there ARE no sidelines. I think that a truly mindful life addresses all of the voices and desires in our beings. When we allow one desire to rise – the desire towards enlightenment, the desire towards health or wholeness or whatever, all the other desires arise as well, with the same gaping mouth. So how do we feed them? How do we nourish? They are all parts of the same I.

When I look the bizarre permutations of Dali’s work or the strange collages of Max Ernst I see the weirdness fully formed and explored down to every last minute detail. By allowing for this full exploration – by seeing it through to it’s end – they were able to then move further, deeper, and higher, into an art that was beyond anything anyone had seen before. You see, to run from that absurdity is to deny oneself something truly delicious in life for, within every mental construct that seems absurd – whether it be a needy little beetle or a flamingly erotic nipple – there is a deeper wisdom. Each piece is a doorway into the infinite and, therefor, each element asks to be explored.

However, like I said, I choose to follow a very direct path in my paintings, in lieu of the sometimes meandering surrealist approach which, more often than not, gets caught up in the weird. At the same time, I think it’s incredibly valuable to give time to that weirdness because that weirdness also needs space to grow and have it’s time in the sun. Every single piece of mental space is there for a reason and begs to be explored. As Dali said, “All roads are the path to God.”

So I write a great deal and, in my writings, allow for the mental states to fully form and drift away. In this way, I can allow for all the minutiae – all the random associations, all the freely  formed absurdly erotic and strangely surreal moments to simply be and to express themselves fully in the plane of my mind as it falls upon the page. By doing this, I create openings and allow for a clearing to happen.

I think this is an important thing for any artist to consider. how do we allow all of our other visions and voices to express themselves if we choose a singular path towards one aim? Look at it this way: the monk – he may choose to deny all forms of expression and in so doing allows for all things to exist on one plane of the mind. In that, no one aspect is given any more or less importance than any other. This leveling of the field is an important part of the process for nothing – neither the glorious effervescence of the dawn nor the uncomfortably unformed quality of the gutter mind is more or less valuable, more or less important, or more or less beautiful. The vastly observant mind simply observes and, in that, experiences a state of being that is sublimely balanced.

As someone who chose the path of the Artist, I give myself over to a certain proclivity and a very outward mode of expression (not to mention that I’ve chosen the life of the ‘layperson’ so to speak with all the attendant colorings). In that, as a creative force, I’ve done my best to carve out a pathway in my mind that allows for a freely flowing river of creative energy – of thoughts and emotions and feelings and inspirations and, above all, an openness to that which is not I.  It is a thing of beauty, that union.

Here is a painting that I did not create:

This is “Echo of a Scream” by David Alfaro Siqueiros. It’s a harsh painting, for sure. I probably wouldn’t paint it, even if I thought it. Instead I choose to paint things that, while they have their grounded corners and their moment of darkness, tend very much towards a sense of what one might call a lightness. People look at what I may have painted and see this body of work that I’ve created with what feels, to me at least, like it has an over-arching narrative of some sort of divine momentum. Where is the absurd, the erotic, the surreal that may exist with my own mind? If this is what the artist is coming up with, he must meditate all the time and only do yoga and probably subsists on some kind of purified vegan diet! (all of which is hardly true)

As I said, if we give permission for one torrent from within us to flow unfettered, so too will all other rivers want to rage. While discipline may be worthwhile to exercise over some and, at that, perhaps it is simply best to nip things things in the bud or, better yet, yank them out by their roots, it is worthy of consideration that we should perhaps give some mediated outlets to others. It is as if we strain to allow one ocean to pass while holding back another which we judge to be of a purer intention. Painting is such a visceral thing and it asks much of the artist.

And so, for me, those various other corners are explored through writing. The written word can express an idea so clearly and completely in but a few lines that it is, I feel, a very efficient way to allow for the mental streams to find their way towards the river that leads to that most divine source that I can imagine. To fully form something on a canvas takes a considerable amount of time and I am inevitably going to consider the composition and if it even make sense with whatever I’m working on (the self-editor at work…). For my free associative mind, to throw ideas out on a page following some absurdist idea and allow it to be done and over with in the course of a few thousand words can be intensely efficient. I want only two things out of it – to lead even those thoughts to their most profound outcome and to create the space for that more sublime beauty that I want out of my painting.

All of these writings – pages and pages of them – that I’ve created over many years of late night meanderings, early morning typing, and random associative imagining, will perhaps one day be published one day and part of my grins at the thought but that’s not the intent of my writing them. Their intent is simply to give an outlet – to be an expression of one more aspect of this divine spirit which is life.

II.

Sometimes, one aspect gets to drive and choose where we’re going. If Bear gets hungry is so hungry that he won’t let Mr. Business Man stop to think then the Mr. Business Man needs to compromise for a moment and allow Bear a chance to eat, understanding that he and Bear share the same body and Bear’s basic needs are as important as his own. If the Mr. Business Man wants to make a deal that seems fluid enough but goes against the ideals of the Inner Buddha Mind then they have to talk it out and see who comes up with the clearest solution. Sometimes the clearest solution is turning down the deal. Sometimes, it’s just a rewording of a contract. If The Lover has just been let down, we must take notice of conciliations offered by Inner Child who really just wants to be loved and allowed to play. The desire to be loved wears many masks and sometimes becomes a motivation that has less than noble intentions for it is an i-me-mine sort of emotion. All the while, the Inner Batman, a vigilant watcher, keeps an eye on everything. Underneath that mask is only me. The inner Batman has the fatal flaw of seeming both aloof and sometimes overly righteous. Yet, he also helps maintain the nobility of all of these aspects, just as Inner Child and the Lover remind him of his softness and ability to yield. All of these aspects – both individually and as a whole – have the potential to devolve into the i-me-mine space.  Yet, they also have the potential of evolving into the all-one-being. So who watches? Who guides? Who is the overseer here? Whose eye is the all-seeing eye? And who really gets to drive?

All together, these aspects are a part of a larger whole that, like Jane’s Addiction or Phish or any other band of great musicians, is greater than it’s parts. That larger whole is both the ego and lack of ego. Ego is simply there as a built up identity structure that the mind creates as a placeholder for “i” in the same way that we create a concept around “cup” or “painting” or “Barack Obama”. We create a concept of an inherent being within us that we identify with. This is all well and good but when the intentions of this being become less than wholesome and the subtle patterning and conditioning of a lifetime of learning at the hands of the cultural norm which preaches the i-me-mine edict, it becomes, shall we say, rather hollow. Yet, when we start to subdivide it and learn it’s nuances, we find different identities who all developed in our being as answers to specific situations that life at one time asked of us.

This, too, is all well and good – my inner meditator might not be so suited for wearing the suit of the inner business man. So the inner business man is there to serve a valuable purpose. The inner business man has his mind on infrastructure and marketing awareness and fair deals and sustainability and growth and doesn’t always think about things like hunger, so there is this bear that is a pretty physically oriented sort of thing. Now, none of those can be tender and soft yet playful and child-like. So we have Inner Child. Then, of course, there is the punk-ass flirtatious lover. Well, to be fair, they are all lovers, but the punk-ass sort of has that bred into him. Watching over all of them is the Inner Batman, aloof yet fully aware of all that is going on – he is there to protect and serve.

I am the sum of my parts. I am like this table: the table is a collection of parts creating a concept of table. I am merely a conceptualization, walking through this world. My paintings are also conceptualizations. Everything that I create is a conceptualization of some mental concept. Even the person I’m creating when I look in the mirror before stepping out the door is a concept – a loose reproduction of what is inside or what I would like to create or be. The only time I stop maitaining this concept is when I stop thinking about it.

There is a magical moment in painting, when I am no longer thinking about what might come next or how that might interact with what has come before it, when the brush and the canvas and my hand and my mind and body and spirit are all one and are moving in this lovely beautiful aware flow. Sometimes these moment stretch… and stretch… Sometimes. Sometimes the mind checks out. Sometimes it’s a record on repeat stuck on some emotionally charged event or phrase or word or person or place. But even then, like a loop in some song, there is a release, a momentary space in which, if we remain open to the possibilities of life, an answer might appear. Most of the time, that answer is: LET GO.

This is the meditation. This is the concept of what I paint. In all of the flames, in all of the clouds and the dark corners, in the stars and spirals, I lose myself, I crumble. And I allow those pieces of me to remain there.

In it’s wake there is always something that goes beyond “a light”. It is what Mircea Eliade called, in all of his studies of the nature of spiritual experience, the “mysterium tremendum”. There really are no words for that space. However, the reflection of that moment of Letting Go upon the canvas is something magical, effulgent, creative. It’s a leap of faith. An effervescent line. A bit of laughter caught in the paint. It’s a reflection of a concept of absolutely everything and absolutely nothing. It is union.