Immediate awareness and fellowship with direct experience holds a peace for me. Horses were my first pathway to a inner knowing. Painting and Art more profoundly direct my attention to this inner dimension. The predominate experience of all communication or relationship is ineffable. It may stimulate thought and analysis, but it is only known in sensation and a continuous flow of insight to how we relate and view the world. A part of the whole, heroic, simultaneously a microcosm housed within the macrocosm. Upside down, inside out and whole nonetheless.

Callahan Road Series; September 2017- September 2018

This series on paper owes its’ origin to a commissioned design project I was working on. I was exploring this strong horizontal format to learn how I wanted to organize the composition.  I discovered in this small format a challenge around how the visual language of line and plane interact and engage the picture’s page placement. Every mark, shift in color and management of edge (sharp focus verse soft atmospheric focus) distilled my mark making down to a crystalized intention. There was no room for meandering and wondering. My hand was forced to be clear and my intention concise. These 11” x 22” works have shifted from studies to an important companion to my large-scale works measuring as large as I am tall. These paper pieces are as demanding if not more demanding of me as an image-maker. I have now come to think of them as haiku projects. A visual essence distilled down to the cooperation between two formal ideas and the visual dance of that conversation.

 Haiku:

A traditional form of Japanese poetry, Haiku poems consist of only three lines. The first and last lines always have 5 syllables and the middle 7 syllables. The essence of a Haiku is “cutting”. A kind of play or juxtaposition and dance of ideas, Haikus are always understood in the context each verse plays and the relationship the three stanzas create together. On the surface, Haikus are a game. But they point too much grander issues opening the reader up to sublime more universal themes.

Pieces from this Gallery are available as original art or a high-quality giclee print produced in limited editions.

We are at least in part the very thing we seek. A "whole" known through its' fragments; the one who sees and simultaneously that which is seen. Feelings are the very substance of our souls. Art can serve as the impulse and gift of this pursuit. Expression, presence and vulnerability are the masters revealing our soul. A still mind that can behold this is the true servant.

Travel compresses and focuses how we come to know oneself, home, and ideas (false) surrounding the notion of “other”. Travel holds in a language of paradox personal wisdom by immersing oneself in the ”foreign” uncovering a common thread of humanity.

My travel in Syria, Jordon and Patagonia uncovered a binding thread in my life. A yearning for a more transcendent way of being. It was profoundly personal while wholly dependent upon the presence of the “other”. Silence and solitude are the primary paths for mystical insights. Search for a non-verbal means of connection forced me to rely on the whisper of intuition and trust in life itself. Direct firsthand fellowship peels away the veil of cognition to express inner dimensions that touch intimate consciousness.

Ineffable:   adjective

Too great to be expressed or described in words. Not to be uttered or spoken. Inaccessible to be spoken of, elusive and ephemeral. Beyond expression.

The sublime experience of awe renders total inner silence. Interestingly we begin to experience sensation in a new way: colors take on a new vibrancy, sound is sensual, nature’s magical abundance uncovered. I discovered a world inverted and upside down in Patagonia and Syria. The natural world of the Middle East revealed limitless variation of seemingly narrow pallet. Patagonia’s rushing winds, expansive, rich and verdant ecosystems uncovered shrouded personal truths that howled with the same urgency to be heard and honored.

The paintings in this new collection set out to reconcile an insistent groundlessness that seems to pervade a media based culture. In these paintings, a new sense of balance is woven together purposely from a place of struggle. This work is about an effort to protect the wild part of our soul that seems to never to be affected by the circumstances of our finite lives.  It requires from us an unwavering self-awareness and asks that we welcome the broken and discordant elements into our heart. In the end this emotional space frees us to the extent we are to show up and be seen ultimately placing these experiences into a new alchemical role of teacher and mentor. This willingness to still oneself provides a path to stay present with the shakiness of hopelessness, choosing whole-hearted presence over the masquerade of a posturing public self.

It may start with railing against a sadness, wrestling it apart from falsehoods that obscured the truth and essence of being “human”. Things arise and alternately also dissolve, there is no escape. We can’t out run this truth. No one is ever spared. We have to learn to love it all anyway.  Loving the demons we once loathed demands that we let go of having things fixed into a permanent way of being. The power of this life is the multiplicities of states we all pass in and out of over a course of a lifetime. The light and shadows of our lives in the end are one and the same. It seems this impermanence is the substance we must learn to love, dissolving the struggle so we can return to ourselves.