Clockwise from top right:
The Wren
Aloja
Checking, Touching, Counting
"For modern consciousness, a physiological act - eating, sex, and so on - is in sum only an organic phenomenon, however much it may still be encumbered by tabus (imposing, for example, particular rule for 'eating properly' or forbidding some sexual behavior disapproved by social morality). But for the primitive, such an act is never simply physiological; it is, or can become, a sacrament, that is, a communion with the sacred.
....sacred and profane are two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history. "
Mircea Eliade
The Sacred & The Profane
Painting for me is a communion between the physical manifestation of my experience and that of my spiritual and intellectual self. Using non-traditional materials such as soil and tea as well as watercolors, acrylics and inks, my paintings become a recorded meditation. In my painting experience, I oscillate between the search for that place just beyond my overbearing inner world - the spirit, God or That - and the instinctive often destructive nature of the mind which seeks to undermine my connection with a creative force often appearing as images of death and decay. Human limitations of mind, body and mortality find their way into cultural notions of divinity and, in return, divinity often finds its way into the macabre or inane details of living. This interplay of mortal and immortal reveals itself to us on a moment to moment basis in constant occurrences of entropy and order. It could also be argued that these dualities are the constructions of modern man and are, in fact, really one in the same. Within each painting session, I choose either to control the mind, to leash the impulses and to settle my ‘self’ or I allow the obsessive, distracted or more primal elements to come through. What I am left with is a multifaceted, multi-layered narrative abstraction that reflects both the blowing into chaos and coming into order that is my personal experience with existence as well as that which I have personally observed of the world at large.
An explanation -