The Flesh Longs,
mixed media, from the Why Do We
Have Bodies?
series, which illuminates the mystical dimension of the flesh by
combining holy texts with drawings of the nude. Many historic
religious mystics spoke of longing for the divine in very sensual
terms.
You Who Come Alive,
mixed media
Will I
Become Naked Enough?
The
Magical Enlargement series stems from the experience of becoming aware
of the presence of something greater than the person whose image I see
before me as I draw the model, who then becomes larger than life.
Image is the Portal, ink
& pencil
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Art or Person, Person or Art?
"The human heart is a theatre of
longing." -John
O'Donohue
A portrait is a description of a particular person. The works in this
exhibition are not portraits although most of them are attempts to
describe a person. The question is: who? Is it the model who sat for
the drawings? In some way, yes, but do the drawings describe more of
the model or of the artist who created them? If it is the latter then
they are largely self portraits. But how could that be said about a
male artist when most of the figures depicted are women?
When
you look at these drawings you see simultaneously a picture of the
person who sat for it and an image of my soul. This is exactly what I
saw take shape on the paper, leaving me with the question: who is
this? I think we can say the same about any relationship: there is
more here than meets the eye. Good artworks have more than one meaning. I believe that artworks are
like people and in some ways people are like art, in that our
relationships yeild multiple levels of meaning. To me, this is what
these works reveal. You can look at these drawings and see that they
are mostly nudes. But you are also confronted by a confusion of
relations, which appears written on the very image as it enters your
awareness. In this dialog who is speaking to whom? 
Challenge, mixed
media, 18 x 24 inches, from the Magical Enlargement
series.
In the Gospel of Thomas (which is not in the Bible) Jesus says “If you
birth what is within you, it will save you. If you do not birth it, it
will destroy you.” Nineteen centuries later Carl Jung, one of the
architects of modern psychology said the same thing in scientific
language, a tongue that many today find easier to understand. And
using poetic language, John O'Donohue says “The human heart is a
theater of longing.” To me these three mystics reveal one of the great
secrets of life: that each of us holds inside of us the keys to
everything.
What I am trying to do with this exhibition
is to make that mystery a little more visible in an area where all of
us traffic daily: that is in relationships. To that end, I am viewing
a relationship (in this case artist and model) as theater– a laboratory
of discovery– using the most common relationship as a metaphor: that
between a man and a woman.
The Veil'd
Realm of Sex, mixed
media, 28 x 36 from the Metaphysical
Maps
The
Metaphysical Maps series lays out seemingly accurate and precise
charts of internal experiences (that in messy reality lend themselves
to nothing like precision!), combining the aesthetics of antique maps
with the looseness of abstract expressionist painting.
View
others in the Metaphysical Maps series
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Whose Desire Turns,
ink
The
female figure is partly a portrait of my own soul, a feminine entity.
Primary Refection,
pencil & inks,
from Active Modeling,
which is a technique
I've developed of using the model to illuminate parts of my own
unconscious that are otherwise hidden, driving a creative search into
the wilderness of my own numinous unconscious.
Femme, oil on canvas
Dilluded, pastel
& ink from the Speaking
Gaze series, which is a dialog about who
is whom, involving artist, model and viewer.
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Paintings and Drawings
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