(2019)

 

My work is about learning to count to one. I attend to how the eye traverses one visual quality, one composition, toward another, how awareness jumps and connects, how it is diffused and distracted; how it reconfigures sight, associative groupings, gestalts, how in the process of painting the hand, the eye, the mind and the spirit are reconnected.

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Awe, for me, is found when verbal thinking is overwhelmed by the delight, that delicacy, the tumult and the weighty drama of sensation, before such is named and made fully conscious. The ineffable experience we often terminate with a declaration of its beauty, even "terrible beauty", still produces a kind of psychic vertigo; a longing and an implicit reminder of our personal insignificance in the sweep of time and space. Such meditation, for me, stills the mental chatter and provides a new platform from which to experience an eternal moment, rooted in the here and now.

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In this way, my work is not about transient situations, per se, but enduring conditions.

 

How does the mind come to interpret sensory data, those tender, delicate, terrible, even brutal, jolting, life-changing qualities? The perception, the presence of mind to be fully with such sensations, and to be actually composed of them without flinching, often comes in kindness and stealth, in beauty, the searing sadness and pain of what is most unbearable, speechless generosity, abundance—sometimes found in grandeur, sometimes in the tiny and seemingly insignificant, in the penumbra, in the periphery of awareness, in silent depths that frame the multitude of joys, sorrows, anxieties and insecurities of life.

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