Artist's Statement |
My paintings seem to be of specific places. They are not. They are places I have created from my experience of intimacy with nature. They are the poetic picturing of my relationship with the natural world. They come from my memories of both wonders internal and external, archetypal and ordinary.
My inspiration began one evening many years ago, when I was stranded on the beach of a small tropical island. I had been sitting alone, watching the sun set and the clouds moving over the darkening ocean. Suddenly everything became intensely quiet. A portion of the sky turned a turbulent blue-black while the rest of it remained turquoise and orange. Then the rain came. The storm was magnificent. I watched until I was soaked, then ran onto the wraparound porch of the closest beach house. Its tin roof amplified the intense rhythm of the storm. Inside, an aged Victrola played a torch song, and a soft yellow light shined out from long wooden shutters. I knocked on the door. Either I wasn't heard, or I wasn't wanted inside.
I was very much alone. I sat down on a hammock, and even though I was cold, my whole body relaxed into the storm, the wind, the darkness, and the music. In that solitude, in intimate harmony with the elements, I experienced incredible joy. I can only describe it as being part of an expansion of time and space: a breathtaking chasm I had managed to enter, which seemed infinite in nature.
My memory of all that powerful earthly activity, and my feeling of wholeness within it, have never left me. I felt I had managed to access a sacred viewpoint, and it is from this place that I paint. |
