What follows is a collection of artwork, and a few words of description about this artwork.  If the imagery herein is interesting to you, then I invite you to enjoy these paintings as they are, without further reference to any other material present in these pages.  Viewing instructions are not required, and you can and should interpret these images - or not - according to your own natural inclination.  I strongly believe that art is the resonance that happens between a painting and an observer; it is only when people are able to bring their own life-experience to a picture that meaning can enter into it.  My understanding of a particular picture may not be relevant to a different but equally valid understanding.

I am often asked, as I suppose most artists are, where I get my ideas.  Inspiration is a difficult concept, and I’m not really sure where these images came from, but many of them were discovered in my search for conceptual patterns that make apparently dissimilar kinds of things also, in some unexpected way, strangely similar.  Perhaps it is because the job requires me to spend so much time alone (and solitary people can make friends with strange things), but I find genuine delight in finding a secret bridge between distant ideas.  I am fascinated by the mysterious repetition of common motifs and patterns that appear in the natural world around us, in our behavior and biology, in our societies and religions, and even in the ethereal worlds of mathematics and physical law.  Seeking to understand these mysterious connections is an integral part of my creative process.  It is perhaps unrealistic (or even foolish, many would say) to expect a painting to have that kind of explanatory power, but writing helps me to clarify and focus my creative objectives.  This personal inclination, however, need have no bearing whatsoever on your experience of these artworks.  These writings are important only in as much as they have made a significant contribution to the evolution of these images.  They are included here to document that process.  And if, when viewing a particular image, you find yourself wondering just what the heck I’m trying to say, you may find the companion writings edifying - and perhaps even interesting.

These artworks defy easy classification.  They often have a landscape, but they are not just simple landscapes.  They have figures, but they are not classical figurative works in the academic meaning of the term.  Some people call such works fantasy, but I dislike that term because it seems to exclude any thoughtful examination of the “real” world - which I certainly endeavor to do, albeit in images that do indeed seem, at first glance, rather unlike the usual world of everyday experience.  The term “visionary art” is somewhat accurate, in the sense that these images are derived from poetic insights of some kind, but the word visionary is burdened by the baggage of its wider overuse in matters not at all related to art.  I do like the term “religious art”, and feel the closest creative kinship with those ancient traditions of spiritual imagination seeking to see beyond sight, reach beyond the limits of rational sensory cognition, to the supporting forms and ideas upon which the material world precariously dances.  Five hundred years ago in the high renaissance, art was the contemplation of nature and the struggle of life and death, amplified in the collision of gods and demons.  I am still pondering that same cosmic drama and unseen wellspring of creation, finding inspiration in the spiritual traditions of East and West, and also in philosophy, psychology, physics, mathematics, and my own personal experience of the world.  Everyone gets a bit damaged by the countless lurking hazards of life, and that damage inevitably affects our perceptions of it. And so art is, I suppose, a fleeting glimpse of something Eternal and Beyond...seen through the broken glass of an artist’s life.

I wanted to make images that would address the questions I have about the world - and maybe even answer a few of them.  It seems to me that there are only two primary modes of inquiry available.  One is directed into the world - science - and asks questions like “What is the world made of and how can we bend to our purposes?”  The other is directed beyond the world - religion - and asks questions like “Where did the world come from and what is it for?”  Both modes of inquiry are equally valid, equally essential, but the tools of one mode are invalid in the other.  One system distills down to the fundamental assertion that “the world came from nothing,” and the other to “the world came from something” - it’s a leap of faith in either direction but you can’t jump both ways.  Science and religion, it seems, are bound like the circumference and radius of a circle: you can know one or the other, but it is not possible to know both with complete precision.  I believe it is the artist’s job to build bridges between these two modes of inquiry - the Mythic and the Naturalistic.  And so I invented my own art classification, which I call Mythic Naturalism. 

It should be the task of the artist to strive (but never succeed) to see the world as it actually is, not merely as it seems to us, based upon the dubious second-hand testimony of our unreliable senses. The artist must grapple with the mysterious poetry of which the world is made, always hoping to find a rare and fleeting glimpse of Truth beyond the veil of illusion that is our thoughts and perceptions of the world...

This unknown mytho-poetic foundation of the world seems to me to be made of two irreducibly fundamental aspects: one is tangible, aggressively pushing out into the ever-changing dynamic processes of the brutal cosmos; the Other is intangible, gently beckoning inward to an eternal tranquility that, in its infinite perfection, never changes. There is only That which moves and That which does not.

In my work (generally speaking), if it is hard and sharp and craggy, if it is gnarled and bent and growing, if it is blowing, surging, falling, if it is bright and shining and burning, if it is objects we can touch and actions we can observe, then it represents the masculine dynamic immanent in nature and the cosmos. Ever aspiring, ever dying, ever reborn again and evolving in new form and ambition. Action and Power.

But there is another presence here, an ethereal, unseen reason to exist that compels the manifest world to action, an essential catalyst and guiding motivation around which the universe revolves on its epic journey, a silent invitation into discovery that dwells in the sacred heart of existence. Mathematics and geometry, logic, archetypal forms, the Laws of Nature. In my work, the Mystery of the Cosmos and the Mystery of the Woman are the same: Source, Destination, and Purpose of all things. Stillness and Beauty.

These paintings, to me, are contemplative dreamscapes of the First Ancestors, the omni-morphic parents from whom all forms of the cosmos have inherited their form; they are images of a sometimes beautiful and sometimes monstrous romance: of hope and despair, of desire and fear, of beginnings and endings...

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The underlying ideas from which these images emerged, a kind of personal mythology or poetic interpretation of the world, changed and evolved somewhat over the years it took to create this collection, but there seemed to be a direction from the very beginning, a final ambition toward which the paintings would journey.  The climactic painting in the series, created in 2003, first came to me as a startling, geometric dream-image in 1990.  Those vague, early inspirations fermented unpredictably over the next decade before taking any concrete form, and yet it now seems that the creative destination I contemplated for so long was the inevitable consequence, not just of those initial visions, but also of all the earlier images in the Mythic Naturalism collection.  And so these postcards from the dark continent of the human dreamscape are presented in (mostly) the same order in which I encountered these strange and unusual things - the order in which they were created.

The first painting in the series, Goddess of the Vale, was first painted (poorly) in 1989.  It hung on my studio wall for 3 years, waiting for revision.  One day in May 1992 it came down onto my easel and was completely repainted in a single 40-hour session.  I have always worked slowly, and so it was a significant event to realize an entire painting in so short a time.  Although I was aided in this effort by a pre-existing underpainting, it was nevertheless an act of some creative courage to obliterate an existing artwork.  And so an act of will, and considerable effort, brought into the world the most interesting work I had yet done.  I would not claim now that this is one of my better works, but at that time the main visual motifs in the image - a prominent Goddess-figure morphologically integrated with a fully-realized landscape - suggested so many other interesting ideas that I knew I had discovered my artistic voice.  Within this conceptual framework, I would try to make images that express a hope that there might be something soft and nurturing in the world - and a fear that there is not...