ARE YOUR EYES NICELY OPEN?
"Tell your people they must learn to wake up their feelings. Their heart must arise from its sleep. It must rise and stand up. That is how you find the track to God."
- The Elders of the Kalahari Bushmen
The San people of the Kalahari, the world's oldest people had the expression of greeting each other, Tsamkwa/tge? (Are your eyes nicely open?), perhaps a reminder to stay awake in the dream of life, to dilate our consciousness towards a place where we may know who we are in relationship to the exquisite beauty of the World and detail of existence.
My first explorations of paintings were simple observational studies - black and white images drawn with an N15 marker, nothing more. It began with a feeling of the closeness and intimacy with the natural world, turnings of the seasons and time - color, texture, movements. A mood. Light. Space itself. And a heightened sensory experience of coming into the elements, being inseparable from them and the temple space of my surroundings. Holding. Being held. In reciprocity and rhythm.
Exploration of a solitary flower or figure evolved into a deeper exercise of drawing forth from the body of my life experience, signs and symbols from my inner world, a language coded with archetypal symbolism, which I ended up distilling into an 80-card oracle card deck called SPIRIT GLYPH ORACLE.
My current series, Butterfly Dreaming, forms the foundation for a forthcoming oracle deck, SOUL PASSAGES— which explores the transformational journey of consciousness across lifetimes. Each painting captures a spark of essence from multidimensional fields of vibration, frequency, and patterns of becoming. No two butterflies are alike; each painting expresses a distinct consciousness journey, a flight path wholly its own, yet all emerge from and return to the same Source. Working in acrylic on Arches Aquarelle Rag, I layer translucent color and texture to translate meditative states of naked awareness into form.
The intention of placing myself in wakeful relationship to the Cosmos, to a living Earth, to my elemental Self, was at the Heart of the Work. Then the vibrancy and mysticism of color. But it all started with a migration of my consciousness. When my perceptions were stripped bare, and I came into direct contact with the essence of things, absorbing and witnessing ALL, not as objects with fixed identities but constellations, in a state becoming, orbiting my awareness field. And my own identity releasing into the vastness of the Present moment. Yes, my eyes, nicely opened.
"Doors to perception explode into the ever-expanding Universe of energy potentials. What shape will I take when every pointed moment is an invitation to join an open edge-less miracle?"
- Meditation on Butterfly Dreaming # 20
"Rivers of stars run through the milky way turning with invisible gears, dreaming currents of deep space into filaments of light, gravity, movement – life. What sunrise can be born in the dark? What genesis spins at my core? How endlessly does this kaleidoscopic body hold the door to other worlds?"
- Meditation on Butterfly Dreaming # 21
My mother used to paint with me in the front yard as a child. I remember the feeling of extended calm that settled over me. I loved to see the transparent dandelion heads come into focus and often blew them into the breeze. It was a time when I was part of Nature and there was no separation between.
My most sensation-filled moments and when I feel closest to Source is when I am free to be with the living Earth.
A few years ago, I had a health challenge and my spirit slipped into other dimensions of awareness. There I discovered a porousness between this world and the world of light, frequency, love. I spent two years healing and it was during this time of uncertainty and quiet strength that I began doing art work.
The art work became a way to drop into that space of no-separation, as I had as a child, and to create a world within this one that could receive my fragmented Self and return me whole. Art is a healer, a lifeline, a way of articulating the kaleidoscopic nature of reality that supports the visible.
I paint to immerse in the unseen and bring it to Light. I paint to see into the pattern of the larger awareness field, to dialogue with the depth dimensions of my own psyche, to perceive the quantum play of God-mind and One-Love on the page. I delight in the unfathomable.
There is an aspiration in the Buddhist tradition, which is to go beyond the mind, to go beyond hope and fear. Who would we be in this state of Becoming?
There is an emergent quality when I paint – a sense of being at the foot of the unknown. Blank canvas. No plan. My favorite part of the process is the beginning, the leap of faith, landing, mark making, the intuitive use of line and color, surrendering the linear aspect of mind, inquiring into a flow state, un-selfing, trusting the process.
The production of a series feels like edge walking, neither here nor there, until the last brush stroke of the larger pattern “wakes up” to what it was all along. I marvel at the result. How does it work? Was it destined to be this way? Did it know all along what it was? What knows?
My deepest sense of connectivity with life, meaning and purpose is this experience unfolding like a dream, of knowing and unknowing, of realization. And then reflecting back on the process by which the creation conceives itself, with awe and fascination. Each moment is a small fractal of God realization, the dilation of my own consciousness as part of the greater web. This beam of wonder, I call love, and spend as much time as possible dedicated to its rhythm.
CONTACT
Selected original art work is available for purchase along with customized prints . Please reach out using the contact form below