Contemporary The Nature of a Revelation Oil Painting

Description

Vessels. I love to paint vessels. Their graceful forms, their connotations of nurturing and security -- the beauty of daily … more Vessels. I love to paint vessels. Their graceful forms, their connotations of nurturing and security -- the beauty of daily life that can still be found or created if we look outside the square plastic box.

You'll note also an unidentifiable script throughout the painting. I've been interested in ancient forms of communication for decades. Early on I incorporated poetry (of great poets) into paintings through transcribing the English sounds into known ancient alphabets and hieroglyphs. Eventually I evolved my own script, which I can write without thinking and which forms are the same lines core to my aesthetic preferences, so the poetry becomes simply a mysterious visual element.


The motives underlying all my paintings are both current and timeless: our common need for sustenance, beauty, and grace. Humans have not changed dramatically since we first appeared and I look for threads of continuity, aiming to make imagery that’s rooted in the mythic, the mystic, and the cycles of Nature.

Paintings of vessels, birds, plant life, and human figures are cast as aspects of an elusive yet inviting sanctuary. Frequently the images are rooted in the remnants of ancient cultures, both tangible and oral, but they are always responding to our current world as well.

Concurrent with my professional art practice, soon after completing a dual major in fine art and philosophy, I was also an organic farmer from 1988-2017 largely occupied with goats and with effecting alchemical transformations of milk and plants. Those decades of raw, ever-precarious, thoughtful farm experience resonate throughout the artwork, testifying to the cycles & perils of life for all sentient beings, humans included. less