Earth and Sky

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Earth and Sky

Updated June 5, 2003

The Start of the Earth and Sky series. A short discussion of the inception of the idea.

Archangel Light The first installment of the visionary quest to paint angels. My work for the past 25 years has lead up to this.

The Dark and the Light: More Archangelic energies.

Tree Portraits is a tangent of the Earth and Sky series focusing [obviously] on trees. Trees are very important in Taoist meditations and are transmitters of energy between the Earth and Sky

Post-Eye surgery and the great beauty I am now seeing.

This piece is quite curious in my work. I had not been working with black, ever before. I painted it on September 10, 2001, the day before the attack on the World Trade Towers. When I finished at the end of the day I wondered what the heck was going on in my work because the clouds were so black. I was too tired that night to change it.

"Prayer for the Women of Afghanistan", September, 2001. the stone is illuminated by the moon behind it and looks like one or two women huddled beneath a veil. This is one of the inaugural pieces in my Henge series where I am working with megalithic standing stones in the Earth and Sky environment. Encaustic paint is a megalithic process and I have researched many images from that time period, even getting into the images from the caves of Lascaux. The Pythagorean Golden mean is used to divide the canvas into earth below and sky above, 1/3 to 2/4 respectively. My early Earth and Sky pieces were devoid of objects on the landscape. The Henge series brings form to the open space. I recently saw the DeVinci and Polish art exhibit at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco and was quite taken with the various background treatments of portraits. I my incorporate some of those notions in my next Henge pieces.

The series is developing. The exciting thing about painting is that it is always growing and changing. The addition of the human figure form came about from working on the miniature worlds and the treatment is similar to the megalithic stone shapes, except, in this case, the figure is created out of clouds. This is a photo of a friend's wife. I had asked them to take pictures of each other so that the whole figure showed in the picture. I wanted to cut them out and have them in the room series. Paul didn't do so well at framing his wife, but I cut her out anyway thinking that perhaps I could complete the figure with a drawing of some sort and thereby have a curious image to use in the rooms - half photo/half drawing. After I cut the figure form from the photograph, I placed a photograph of a cloud scape behind the picture. It looks quite surreal; a figure made of clouds on a landscape at sunset with some strange object just visible in the distance.

As the Earth and Sky series has been evolving, I have started to put objects on the land. I have been working with standing stone images from the Megalithic period. I may do a standing stone made of clouds. There are many possibilities.

My colors are intensifying. This piece is the result of my interaction with the multidimensional music of Jacotte Collette. Changes take place in my work because of changes in my environment. The work grows because of interactions with people and other creative artists. The Earth and Sky series is about my deeper feelings as a human. The images all come from the deep unconscious. I place myself into a state of meditative suspension. I do not know what the piece will look like when I begin. I simply begin. The image at the left is a first passage. Usually I make many passages over a canvas. For this particular piece, I decided to leave it in its raw state.

For historical comparison, this is a piece made in 1984, as the series looked at that time. In 1975 an art curator for a mid-western museum told me that he thought my work looked like young Michael Angelo and he wondered if, when I grew older, if my work would take on a darker vision as Angelo's did. In the 70's I wanted to paint air and light. I have felt it a challenge to work with darker images. I like Van Gogh's comments in his letters to his brother Theo that he could see light even in the darkest shadows. I have challenged myself to work with black, red and yellow over the years. My goal is to infuse a painting of those colors with the same ethereal lightness that can be achieved with pastels. I can envision it in my mind's eye, I can feel, I am working still to actually render it. It's a great quest and I love it.