Artist's Interview: Part 5
Artist's Statement | Biography | Narrative Bio
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Q: Is your imagery pre-meditated or is it spur of the moment?
A: My imagery is both spur of the moment and pre-meditated. The initial inspiration is spur of the moment. I then usually go through a protracted period of analyzing it, considering it, understanding it from different perspectives and points of view, in relation to a set of relationships with it. This stage typically involves many sketches, at first small, then larger, usually in charcoal on tracing paper, where I further understand the image and the image's tolerances for distortions or variations, much as trying on different manifestations of a given archetype (dog, yes: but what kind of dog? Long? Shaggy? White?...Wolf?). I may then go on to make further small sketches in color, usually in pastel, and beyond that sometimes larger drawings, if the composition is somewhat complicated, in pastels or watercolor. I spend a long time thinking about the image, about how to paint it, the canvas, getting the rhythm of the form's gesture, its rhythmic "swing." When the time comes to execute the actual painting, I experience a lucid calm. Working on instinct I mix the colors, choose my instruments and surrender to the flow of the event and to my knowingness. A painting's execution usually takes a few minutes, usually not more than a few hours. I may do more than one in a day, or only one.Since I usually work in series, I stay with a given series until its completion. In the past I have typically completed a series of large scale paintings (about 9 by 6 feet or so), about 10 to 20 paintings per series, in about a year's time. I start a new painting series by gathering materials, buying canvas and lumber to stretch all the paintings I have decided to make for the new, as yet inconceived, series. I spend much more time, in fact, stretching canvas, building stretchers and priming canvas than I do actually painting the images.
There is usually a period between painting series when I study the last series' paintings, enjoying them and getting to know them, collecting impression and ideas from them, regarding them individually and within the context of the completed suite and so on. Later a period of thrashing around sets in during which I consider what to do next: what, given what I've done up to then, I may want to do next, or what may be left to be done, taking stabs at some smaller canvases to try out new ideas or images, and so on. I may work on other projects as well both before and during the execution of a series of paintings, turning out prints, drawings and smaller paintings. Eventually I get some ideas that I feel are interesting and worthy enough to make a painting of and I start the new series by making the first one, or two, or three... The rest of the paintings develop out of a feedback process that takes into consideration the paintings I've already done and what kinds of things I feel the new series is about. In this phase of my work there is a lot of just sitting around, looking at paintings, thinking about them, thinking about possibilities, getting ideas, inspirations; there is not much actual thrashing about in terms of reworking and wrestling with the canvas, with the stuff of painting. My work doesn't emerge, generally, any more, from a process-oriented search and struggle, nor through the playing out or exorcising of intense emotions or psychological dramas; nor do I consider paintings worthy foes that I must vanquish, or through force of will, conquer.I do not generally set out to execute a given set of pre-determined images or ideas.6 The title of each suite, a sense of my understanding of the suite's "signature essence" usually comes to me after the series is finished and I have had time to reflect on the paintings, but sometimes it comes in the middle of making the series. The last half of the series is the most difficult because by that time I consciously take into consideration the sense of the suite as a whole and the kinds of paintings that will be appropriate, even necessary, to round it out. The sense of a series as a whole emerges during the course of its making. It emerges, as do the individual pieces, from a self-conscious process engaging intellect, intuitive faculties and formal sensibility.
It emerges through a process analogous to musical composition: themes, images, melodies come forth through inspiration. They are considered, explored, refined to their essence, their identities recognized and understood. Variations are discovered or evolved, and the different expressions of their common essence also discovered and understood. Relationships between themes are perceived, and large and small patterns between them are considered and established. Main compositional elements, parts within parts, parts of the whole, are articulated. The sense of the whole, the "signature pattern," consisting of multi-valenced patterns formed from the interrelationship of the parts is understood and expressed, variously, in degrees of explicitness. The results are Art: architecture, music, painting, sculpture, dance, poetry, literature and philosophy. The art piece: manifestation in sensible form, its parts interrelating within a coherent whole; the patterns of their interrelations rhythmically orchestrated through the particular methods of its craft, defined by its medium; the art piece exhibiting order, intelligence, form and correspondences between it --between its identity as a whole-- and its parts; an order, intelligence, form and correspondences, or sympathetic resonances, to which our souls respond, in recognition, perhaps, of their own essential being. "Like Nature."My paintings carry an almost paradoxical, antithetical combination of absolute spontaneity of execution --they tend to happen all at once, without fussing or changes-- and a long gestation and preparation period where I consider all about them before birthing them in a flash. They are both the product of intense study and intellectual considerations, and of intuitive inspiration and passionate emotion.
I like to, and set myself to make paintings that are alive, that breathe and glow, that are light, enduring, that are nourishing, healing and benign, that are generous, grand and expansive, that reflect the highest sublime expression of all that is best and highest in me.
Q: The Venus series mentions a "...divine dimension of infinite potential prior to creation." Does this not also describe the notion of time with its infinite possibilities? Or is time linear and thus finite, perhaps more predestined than the moment prior to creation?
A: There is a time, as I discuss above, in the planning of new painting series, when nothing is manifest, when everything potentially exists. It is a quiet time of absolute freedom and unlimited choices, a time when anything can be, but nothing is yet; when the matter at hand is one of deciding what it is that will be. It is indeed a void, filled with the weight of decisions not yet made and of infinite, unmanifest potential.
Q: Your page mentions "dimensionless realm of First Principles." To what principles are you referring?
A: I refer to such things as presence/absence, oneness/many, being/not being --in other words, to the things before even the foundation or the blueprints: to the things that must be determined before even any thought of manifestation may occur.
Q: One theory states that: "In the sacred mystery schools of Lemuria, Atlantis and Egypt, sacred geometrical exercises were the bases of your beliefs. It was understood that in order to transform your physical body into light (Merkaba) that you had to create an energy field of light around you in order to separate you from the lower vibrations." This could be accomplished through meditation/breathing exercises and prepared one for the ascension into their next existence.
To quote your web page, "...Rhapsodies trace the transmutation of concepts into manifest forms across the subtle boundary between energy and matter." When you describe the Easter Cycle paintings you state that they "...are meditations on the duality of human life, as they affirm the indissoluble bond between spirit and matter." I am curious as to your views on the "subtle boundary of energy and matter"?
A: I see The Rhapsodies as having one foot in nature and one in archetype. It's a transitional series, leading from the nature based Ode to Nature series to the more purely abstract Birth of Venus paintings. This transitional quality in the Rhapsodies manifests in the suite as a back-and-forth swing and a blending of Ode to Nature's explicit structures with the more conceptual, reductive, insubstantial imagery of the Birth of Venus paintings. The Rhapsodies paintings allude to either nature, or to abstract first principles, or they mix in the two, and they do this in different ways. They are about ideas on the relationship between the physical universe, figuration, or structure, and the finer, abstract, higher dimensional planes of energy and thought. So, I say, for want of a happier turn of phrase, that they "trace the transmutation of concepts into manifest forms" and that they do this "across the subtle boundary between energy and matter,"although I probably meant to say something more inclusive, such as "thought, energy and matter."
When I say about the Easter Cycle that the paintings "affirm the indissoluble bond between spirit and matter" I speak more in the context of the human dimension than of cosmic creation in general. As mandala-like images, the Easter Cycle paintings seem to me symbolic of man's individual soul. Variations on a single form, the rectangle, bisected at mid points and joined at vertices by intersecting diagonal, horizontal and vertical lines, the suite is a series of variations upon the theme of resurrection metaphorically expressed two ways: as transformations of the soul, expressed formally through the paintings' structural continuity, and as its metaphorical correspondence in Nature, as expressed through changes brought about through seasonal cycles. In these paintings, which allude to human emotional states and natural cycles, spirit (gesture and color) animates matter (structure), thus demonstrating the inseparable presence of spirit in, and its vital imprint on matter.
Q: So in your metaphysical model, I assume that spirit and energy are one in the same? Could you elaborate on spirituality?
A: I feel now that spirit is different, essentially, from energy; energy, like matter, being a manifestation of creation, and spirit being more directly identified with the Creator, and therefore preceding creation. Nonetheless, in the created universes the two are inseparable: it is Spirit's essence that animates creation, as metaphorically, it is the presence of color and its expressive handling in the Easter Cycle paintings that animates their static structures, allowing them to bloom, wither and regenerate.
