Introduction (Long Form)

“The universe as we observe it is the only reasonable starting point in cosmology.”

Stephen Hawking

Mystical musings, messy interactions, provisional notions, and pleasures. I’ve been trying to find a way to put paint into words for years, but it always remains one step ahead of me. The elements of a painting make no sense to a logical mind, like an equation that mixes its units, yet occasionally add up to spaces that hold together my disparate thoughts. The only way I know how to do it is to place one mark on a surface at a time and see where it leads.

I begin a painting without an end in mind. Everything depends upon how I respond to the subject, or as Del Close (one of the early gurus of modern improv) put it, “My friends, you are all under the misconception that you are the most important person on the stage. You are not. Your scene partner is.”

To this, I add a desire to see the world simply, with a bit of seeing-things-for-the-first-time reverence and awe, and to converse with it through this lovely gooey wondrous elemental substance I squeezed onto a palette. A painting is what remains as evidence of a gradual awakening into awareness.

I’ve found from experience this can’t be rushed – and I’m always suspicious of any response that feels unwarranted or premature. In this uncharted way, a painting becomes the sum of countless thoughts and elaborations, hesitations, affirmations, and frankly, a lot of inconsistencies. But as the poet A. R. Ammons once wrote to a friend, “No, I don’t like a poem too perfect & beautiful, but flawed and great.”

I like to think my paintings are what happens when curiosity collides with reality, the trees talk back, and cosmic forces run amok. The funny thing about art is that it will succeed with or without a coherent argument. What emerges in my paintings is a quiet, persistent state of consciousness, both a reflection of nature and a liberation of the mind from nature.