Welcome

Over the years, my experience writing artist statements has been a lesson in acceptance and perseverance. Finding the 'right' words to describe what is essentially a nonverbal visual process is a tricky endeavor. Instead of broadening or deepening an understanding of the artwork, my words seem to narrow the depth and mystery of the layered emergence of the images.

After reading "A New Earth", by Eckhart Tolle, his words aptly describe the embodied experience that occurs when I am drawing and painting.  Tolle writes:  "… when you are alert and contemplate a flower, crystal, or bird without naming it mentally, it becomes a window for you into the formless. There is an inner opening however slight, into the realm of the spirit."

When I am drawing and painting, the physical, psychological and emotional dimensions come together in a heightened exchange that is intuitive, innate and unnamed. Tolle describes this state of Being as "the still alert Presence of Consciousness itself… the awareness that is prior to and deeper than any thoughts and emotions."

My Art

I view my art as a search for poetic realizations of Carl Jung's concept of the archetypal image. Jung writes: "[t]he creative process so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life. Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age."