SPHERICAL

TRANSFIGURATION

Difficult concept for me. It all distills down to the purity & simplicity of this single moment. The great spiritual leaders of the past do not merely exist in history which, after all, slips through the fingers of time like silky mist. They exist now. They emerge in me & you in real time. Now!  

Yeshuah… Siddhartha… Lao Tzu… Rumi… Gandhi… when I ease back on the throttle of my personhood… they come forward… through their words… & more mysteriously they emerge holographically in our very being. 

My great friend Bryan bears a striking resemblance to the great pharaoh Akhenaten. Uncanny really. This is not to say that Bryan is anything but his own person. In Bryan, I see traces… nay seams of the great visionary monotheist, the source for Moses & the beginning of the Judeo Christian culture. Akhenaten surfaces here in real time in the being of my brilliant young friend.

THE EMPEROR

How to represent the Divine in an image… is it possible? Arguably all art is an endeavour to approach that challenge. What other proof do you need but Bach’s Mass in B minor… Monet’s Water Lilies… or Heisenberg’s theories for that matter. I love symbols. Understanding the patterns of symbols… the narrative of images they represent… the secrets they enfold… this pleases me. There is no solution only the intrigue of the puzzle. Who was Akhenaten? What are the ages of Aquarius, Ares, Pisces? Did we really come from the constellation Orion? The colours of the chakras… can that possibly be more than a superstition? A fish, two rams, a cobra & a dove…. what do I know about these? The sun… always the sun… it all goes back to the Light. The penetrating light. A mystery prevails. I enter that mystery. Hmmmmmmm…… Aha!

NEFERTITI

All sentient beings…  I wish to befriend all sentient beings. Like St. Francis of Assisi I wish to offer my most sincere & beauteous thoughts to the birds of the air , the fish in the sea, the felines in the forest. My cat Nefertiti sits quietly on the window sill while I write this… eyeing me with curiosity… blinking in agreement.  I have arrived at that simple stage… almost childlike where all I am is curious. I am curious about everything…. hmmm how does that work… what is the reason for that? I am becoming a scientist of the curious… like my cat. Dispassionate…. calm… delighted… in love with the world… curious….hmmmm?

MUMMIES

  Not sure how to take this fact… the ancient Egyptians venerated their cats so much they mummified them. It was a capital crime to kill a cat on the streets of Thebes. Cats were sacred. I own three cats so I guess I am guilty of participating in Bastet’s ancient cat cult….. & then there is the mummies. Something ludicrous & creepy & truly funny about these artifacts. If I were a cartoonist I would love the form these cat mummies take. Check out their faces. Sometimes I have to pinch myself. Reality is more dreamlike than I ever imagined… who would of thunk….. cat mummies… what next?

SPHINX REDUX

I may not know much at all about anything but I do know that a great mystery abides in the origins of our civilization. As we approach the end of modern times it behooves us to look back into  where we came from. Like me, I am sure you look with perplexity on the culture that lived on the Nile in the days before Moses. Who were those people? Were they us? The statue of the Sphinx on the Plateau at Giza is tens of thousand years old… likely older than the empires of  recorded ancient Egypt. The more I know the less I understand. We seem to have amnesia for where we came from & who we are. I am willing to say I just do not know. However… there are tantalizing clues everywhere. The answer is staring us in the face. The riddle of the sphinx is simply that question…. “Who are you … do you know who you are?”

SPHINX

I conceived of this painting as a schematic for the design of the Sphinx. The sphinx cat is a bizarre creature. I know. I live with one. Imagine if the Creator was Rube Goldberg or a committee of whimsical inventors. Project 6784ab34: “Create the design for a feline”. I imagine this painting as the blue print for such a design. Lines scribbled up & down… round and round. Until by accident a semi gargoyle ugly duckling creature of mystery appears from the cross hatches. Not sure I understand the connection with the lion woman statue in ancient Egypt except that both are beguiling & mysterious. If you could create a cat out of doodles you would have my cat Nefertiti. Oh yeah… I named my Sphinx Nefertiti to add compliment to injury.