Milkweeds

This is an evolution of the milkweeds motif that has entranced me for a growing number of seasons. They are particularly striking in November, shuddering in the cold wind on a hillside beneath a slate sky deeper than the ocean. I had originally planned a fairly complex scene, (pre-composition is fairly unusual for me)...but this idea succumbed early in the process to a rhythm and play of depth that both surprised and pleased me.

One of my earliest and unexpected inspirators was Basquiat. There is something magnetizing about the mark of dynamic lettering on a surface distressed by the elements. I take myself for an element as I paint and endeavor to distill the seeds of articulated ideas poetically, with a greater emphasis on the dynamic gesture of writing than literality. I aspire always to poetry, to the movement and texture of language as the embodiment of message.

True, without falsehood, certain and most true, what is below is like what is above; and what is above is like what is below; for performing the miracles of the one thing. 
~the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus

The more I study the motif of a shape: a snail or nautilus shell, stalks and blades of field grasses, the shriveled seed pod when autumn had drained its color – the more I recognize how it echoes and repeats itself in so many different circumstances. In the milkweed, I see the entrance of a church, the entrance of a woman, a mouth, a cave, a womb, an eye ... and all of these things carry in common a profound and dynamic receptivity; they are chambers of transformation, they are sanctuaries, they are doorways into another world. 

Dance a dance fading to death in November and do you remember do you remember all of the pages that have passed in front of these eyes? beyond in the dark in the umber and ochre, November with her cool gold sun, distant, waning. fading farewell in an ever earlier evening. the shuddering skeletons that once held fresh bloom, warmed brown and orange red under a quiet sun. Now they are statues that regale the stars. now they cluster and hover and gather as the moon passes over. They wait and they watch. They become a shadow of a shadow of a shadow of a rhythm, a frozen kingdom filled with the echoes of many upon many slow slow eyes. November.