LAST SUPPER

All art is a conversation... a reflection back and forth from one observer to the next over the continents & over the generations. We look into the mirror of the work of art & we see the image of both the artist & ourselves. Leonardo painted the Last Supper on the wall of that refectory & it ripples down to me five hundred years later. Likewise, I always thought the second coming was the return of an actual human being. I have come to know that the second coming is a possibility in each & every one of us & manifests as the brilliant surfacing of our true & eternal selves.

SENSES

We have five (plus). How do we sketch out a field of reality from little electric blips arriving at  the mother board of our brains? Somehow it all coheres. I am mesmerized by the patterns of the world seen scintillating across the surface of a lake. In the scraps & fragments of reflected, refracted light I make out a pattern I can comprehend. What little I know of science baffles & perplexes me. Photons... discrete packets of energy...  from a neighboring star cross empty space strike an eagle flying above the surface of a body of water on an orbiting rock & ricochet through the complex optics of the globe of my eye & the resulting sequence of co-ordinated depolarizations map out the world as it is. Seems incredible. I wish to express my incredulity & my awe.

REFLECTION

My two great themes are water & light. I see myself as a master of light. My goal in this painting: to capture both the eagle’s flight & the play of light on the surface of rippling water. My other goal... paint an eagle realistically. I wish to simultaneously acknowledge the place of painting in the modern world & to render what is seen in a manner that approaches verisimilitude. The bald eagle has been hijacked as a symbol by the American Imperial power structure. This does not interest me. The raptors,  like the sharks, are the most beautiful creatures of all. Bald Eagle. Reflection of Bald Eagle. My contemplation of the great source of life... light itself.

SOURCE

How ever we define the complexities of being alive it always comes down to a sense of being divided from who we once we were & who we are. Being born, ironically, is a taking leave... a dying as it were. Dying is an entering... a returning... a being born. How do we reconcile the division of our divine selves from the loving awareness that created & creates, not only us, but all that is? I recognize in glimpses of recollection... when the fog of amnesia is not upon me... that there is no division. I am at the centre always. The Source emanates... radiates eternally. It includes all the facets, all the fractals. It expands ever-outward, kaleidoscopes ever-inward from the centre. My fellow sentient being: walk the labyrinth with me, inward, spiraling, circling, orbiting to the centre. To the source.

GRID

The understanding of the Divinity of the universe comes to me through the grids of science. If nature is  circular, spiral , spherical; a grid is an abstract, linear construct used to delineate the extent of the ever-unfolding beauty. Try to get your head around the concept of a field... a gravitational field... a geo-magnetic field. A field is a potential... a possibility... the Taoistic ‘non-being’... not “nothing”... but an emptiness that contains influence once entered....everything in gestation, in embryonic form. The mind... my mind in fact is nothing more than the field of my consciousness. The Universe is the Mind of the Creator... a field on which every thing, like a sudden thought in my day’s ponderings, comes into being.

NEGATIVE SPACE

 In drawing we learn to define the object of our vision by what it is not. In the Tao I never know whether it is the Jar that holds the water or the water that fills the Jar. Is it the dancer that dances the dance, or the dance that defines the dancer dancing? I am drawn to the shadows... to the deep space between the stars. How do I know who I am except by learning what I am not? Being.... Not-being. Night followed by day. As an artist I create the object of my vision in all its beauty or I give shape to the shadows... the dark spaces that in the contrast delineate the pattern that needs to come into being. 

SPIRAL

Hear what the white cat speaks.
See what the black cat sees.
But know what the orange cat knows.
One then / one now / one.... forever one.

Close your eyes & all you see is green...
A sea of green... the air a trillium breathes...
Emerald light... a meadow pond in May...
The aloe dream of seedlings’ winter day.

Where are we from? Who are we? 
We have been sent. We mean to heal.
& we are with you. We are here.
We have been sent. We are here. 

There’s a tree at the spiral’s stillest centre.
It’s at the end, the start, it’s where we enter.
Walk & walk... each step’s a breathless breath.
Breathe the labyrinth... slow the starlit path.

Hear what the white cat speaks
See what the black cat sees
But know what the orange cat knows
One then / one now / one.... forever one