Threshold
mixed media collage with encaustic & oils
 10” x 10” 
2017

Collage is a divination. Things call: a color that pulls the gut, a feather on the morning stoop, the eggshell beneath a tree-full of tiny robin shrieks. I notice the things that crack me open. Or they notice me. Following the weaving of attention through cradles of phenomena: this is a practice of recognition.

Spontaneous juxtapositions reveal unanticipated intimacies. The inquiry contains a reply–a coded reflection that was somehow invisible before. I am captivated by the wanderings shepherded by my hot air gun as I prod them like paper boats in an eddy. I can only suggest and whisper.   Here is a gateway, an approaching door. There is an infinitude, suggested by the velocity of blue-shattered shell.

Antique red. Oxblood red. Indian red. Cadmium. Venetian. Alizarin. I have never used red for more than an accent. This is pulsating, menstrual, it is the heat of sex and of sacrifice. Letters and words float up from below, traces of words, fragments awash in red. At the centre is a door: a gateway. It emerges and it recedes. At its base, naked branches reach upward; they are cracks, they are briar roses around a sleeping castle. Three tattered strands of silk, white and black, cross the front like barbed wire hung with feathers. Catching dreams.

Many months after completing the painting, I find a photograph entitled The Door’ in my files. On a desolate and grey February day, I glimpsed this door, masquerading beside a busy thoroughfare in Providence, the duration of its guard measured by a lattice of vines; slightly ominous, seductive. I stood riveted, not a doubt in my mind that behind it lay a sleeping kingdom.