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For a variety of reasons, many of us are prompted to examine our lives. The reasons may range from the deeply personal to the political. I believe that life poses deep unanswerable questions and that an honest examination of these questions is invaluable. This process in union with feelings and perceptions create ambiguities and internal conflicts not easily resolved. To face these conflicts honestly is very difficult, but can be a turning point in ones life. When these conflicts become conscious they take on differing forms according to our individual natures. In my search for answers I turn to painting, which allows me to express both my thoughts and feelings.
I am devoted to the power of the light and the dark. I believe they best live in harmony with one another. At this moment in our history, the dark has overshadowed the light and the balance is severely disrupted.
For a number of years, I have been painting large-scale watercolors. When I started to include reflective surfaces of gold leaf it opened me to a full-scale mixed media approach, which has continued as I use materials to better develop the content of my paintings. For example, in “Red Rider”, I wanted an ancient ancestral feeling of place and the people who inhabited it. After I used gesso to build up the figures, I rubbed them with earth pigments and then treated the surface with a crackle material to push them into the past. “Red Rider” is colored from the red earth of Kauai in homage to the societies that have included the intuitive and the dream in their decision making.
It seems to me that we will never solve our problems with head on confrontations. In the nuclear age it a disastrous program. It is incumbent on us to look into the face of our demons and see ourselves. It is a spiritual opportunity.
I pose these paintings both as questions and as answers. They mean one thing to me; to you they might mean another. I encourage your questions and your answers.
Is there more than meets the eye?
Recent Show: A Painters Book of Days
These cautionary tales, perceptions, poems, meditations and mysteries are my way of thinking in pictures. They are snapshots of my mind. I have long been involved with a common theme. A union of opposites. Even my painting techniques are involved with it. A quote that I have had pinned to the wall in my studio for years says: "The opposite of Love is not Hate, it is the persistent use of the rational mind."
I used to think that the power of transformation would turn the lights on in the human spirit, that our consciousness would heal the past and transform the world. When the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold war ended the world seemed to be headed in that direction. We seemed to be learning that communication and negotiation were powerful ways to solve our difficulties. The information highway was created to this end. Through it all, terrible events were brewing and they began to surface again, but our leaders weren't doing their homework, Instead of facing a situation which presents profound new challenges, they preferred to retreat into past feuds and delusions, giving us Rwanda, Bosnia, The Bush Administration, Fundamentalism, Murder, Mayhem and WAR.
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