| Sentient Truth…the process of holding onto the impulse of vision
Encounters from my dreamspace end up on the tip of my brush
A single brush stroke of color can prompt an instantaneous recall…a sublime message from dreamtime.
An image appears on the canvas before the brush meets the surface.
Meeting red in a dream is like meeting no other red on earth…the same can be said of fire, water, rock or rubble.
Smelling the fragrance of garnets and emeralds in my dreams is like no other olfactory sensation anywhere in the waking world.
I work from a place where dreams and memory fuse into color, light and form. The volcano…a dangerous scientific phenomenon …swollen earth, building pressure and a thrust of energy from the deepest root chakra of the earth…a caldron of fire…the earth‘s pelvic bowl…the burning ghats of Varanasi and the airborne ash from the cremation piers landing softly on my face…the life that exists on the edge between the fluidity of the ocean and the stability of the land…the storm boiling overhead with extensions far out over North Africa…a crystalline spot of blood on a rock.
The act of painting ignites the truth of dreams. It is not the storyline that works its way into my painting but the juicy, emotional sentience of fire, water, light, color, texture, gesture and all the abstracted essences from which paintings are made
I look for transcendence in my painting…transcendence unencumbered by reason…revealed not from an active search but from patient surrender…a surrender to that which spreads open the deepest place of dreams and memory…the place beyond language where remnants of dreams reside. This is the space where the truth of painting is found…the space from where it all happens…the space I must fully enter in order to reveal the truth.
I remember reading of a conversation between two artists, a painter and a musician. As I recall, the discussion involved how one gets to the place of truth in one’s work. The painter said when first entering the studio he finds it to be filled with great artists that he admires. As he begins to work, one by one they leave until he is alone there with his painting. The musician agreed that he experiences the same but added, it is only when he also leaves, that he enters that space of truth and the music happens.
It only happens for me in solitude, when I get out of my own way and dreams and memory merge with paint.
Is landscape nature or through our eyes…culture. Is every landscape a work of the mind, “a repository of the memories and obsessions of the people who gaze upon it…?
With special thanks for the inspired writings of Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, Alfred A. Knopf Inc. New York, 1995
|
