STATEMENT OF INTENTION

My primary interest in painting is the illumination of spirit.

The interior landscape is such a rich but ill-defined and shadowy place, always shifting, full of surprises, and often quite scary in its intensity. Through my creative process, which is deeply rooted in mindful existence and a quest for self-actualization, I am able to graciously acknowledge the monsters within and call forth the angels that live among them. Each canvas presents a new aspect of the psyche that I've grappled with and sought to illuminate for others.

For out of darkness comes the light.

Soular Power, 2017, oil on canvas, 36" x 36"

now on view at Mindful Art Gallery, Berkeley, Ca.

It is said that we are all made up of stardust.

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I believe that by exploring the deepest reaches of our internal landscapes, we can understand the greater truths ruling the universe. As such, I'm simultaneously reaching out in two directions, pulling from the depths of within and pushing out toward the great beyond. The energy flows both directions and I am but the conduit.

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For me, the act of painting has always represented the most joyful and free state of being. Since I became interested in the esoteric, the metaphysical, the mind-body-spirit connection, I have sought to comprehend how one's internal landscape affects his lived experience. I now understand my personhood as a point on a graph, with everything on one side of the graph extending within - to the internal realm of spirit - and the other side extending without - to the external realm of physical experience. It is the precarity of this point-relationship that fascinates me: the balance of living a physical life when so much of our reality is determined by the utterly non-physical: the truly abstract realms of mind and spirit.

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I understand now that through the process of painting I am able to give that spirit energy a place in the physical world and that the joy and freedom I've long experienced as a byproduct of this process are the result of a harmonized interior and exterior life.