Artist Statement
Improvisations: Icons & Artifacts
Revelation through Juxtaposition
Improvisations: Icons & Artifacts
Represent unmediated
Responses of the heart
To the wonders of the world
Their process of creation
Poses a paradox -
They cannot be made
Only discovered
But they do not exist
Until they are made
The process of making is
Ad Hoc
Open Ended
Spontaneous
Improvisatory
Unpredictable
Empirical
Frequently Impetuous
Making itself up
As it goes along
Grandma Moses
I never know how I'm going to paint until I start in; something tells me what to go on and do.
Just as in Jazz
Groups of musicians
Come together
To make new music
So these objects
Come together
To make new meaning
Fortuitous
Serendipitous
Intersections
Of disparate things
Form spontaneous
Revelatory unions
Wynton Marsalis
The whole question of Jazz is manipulation of the spontaneous.
Martha Graham
It is no more strange that freedom should be acquired by discipline than that spontaneity — the most natural seeming of all moods — is not chance or happy accident but is selected circumstance achieved by intention and design.
These unions connect
The deliberately sought
To the fortuitously found
The altogether unexpected
To the totally surprising other
Opportunistically seized
In affirmative response
To the Voice of the Heart
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.
The Little Prince
Whatever the original context
Forest
Stream
Beach
Attic
Desert
Mine
Garage
Dump
Gallery
Tomb
The unexpected
Juxtaposed
With the unanticipated
Frees the objects
From the binding nets of association
Startles them
Out of the known
Into the unknown
Sets mind adrift
In search of new meaning
Creating new eyes
New contexts for seeing
That lead mind past
The barriers of the known
Into the luminous wonder of being
Dubuffet
Seeing is not knowing the name of the thing you are looking at.
Samuel Beckett
It resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say pot, pot and be comforted.
Watt
William Thurston
You don't see what you're seeing until you see it. But when you do see it, you see many more things.
Discovery: Phase OneAssembling the Matrix
"I seen it as soon as I saw it and I knew what it was!" HMG
P. D. Ouspensky
Everything is alive . . . there is nothing dead, it is only we who are dead. If we become alive for a moment, we shall feel that everything is alive, that all things live, feel and can speak to us.
Epiphanies of Things
Over decades
Certain objects
Compelled attention
Spoke of something inward
A secret residing at the center
A mystery that compelled acquisition
James Joyce
Its soul — its whatness leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance.
Something of oneself
Unknown to consciousness
Passes into the object
This Shard of Being
The unknown content
Now hidden in the object
Confronts consciousness
With a previously unknown
Aspect of itself
Recognition
Draws it up
Out of darkness
Into light
Immanuel Kant
Everything we find in objects is put into them by ourselves.
Gathered together
The objects
Form a critical mass
A matrix of possibility
For discovery and revelation
A womb from which the work
Will be born
Consciousness expands
Knows what previously it did not know
A new work is born
Discovery: Phase TwoIn Search of the Narrative
Finding and fitting together — what goes with what? . . . for many be called, but few chosen — Matthew 20:16
Attraction of Affinities
Gathered into a critical mass
The multiplicity of objects
Draw into their orbits
Those others
Through whose affinities
Their narratives unfold
Sometimes years pass
Before the secrets
Of which they speak
Are understood
And years before they find
The others with whom they belong
The Gospel of Mark
For the Kingdom of Heaven is as if a man should cast seed into the ground and sleep and rise, night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up he knoweth not how. For the Earth bringeth forth fruit of her self — first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, for the harvest is come.
When the objects
Find the others with whom they belong
Join the narratives in which they play a part
Sudden Meaning Sparks The Gap
One is struck
As if by lightning
Pierced by the living fire
Revelatory juxtapositions
Move consciousness
From passive seeing
Into direct experience
And the still arrangements
Come to life
Mysteries unfold
Secrets are penetrated
Questions answered
A New Song is Sung
Discovery: Phase ThreeThe Enclosures Evolve
Beloved finds beloved and they build their house
Adolf Loos
Spirit creates its own body.
Instabilities and Adjustments
Each new object
Placed in a developing context
Creates an instability that must be balanced
Either with other objects
Or by myriad precise adjustments in space
Just as musicians pull strings into tune
Paul Klee
Exactitude winged with intuition.
The synergy of juxtaposition
Activates a magnetic field
Drawing together
The never even thought together before
Perfectly placed
In self-evolved environments
The objects rest on the gravitational field
Of an invisible ordering geometric grid
Poised in dynamic stasis
The proportional relations
Between the objects
Define the limits
The volume and dimensions
Of each containing space
The stages on which
Their interactions
Come to life
The enclosures
Direct the lens of attention
Onto the unfolding narratives
Posing questions
Awakened
By the viewer's
Lived experience
Moving mind beyond the confines of the finite
Into the realm of the immeasurable
Repositories of Meaning
Each object
Is in itself
A Reliquary
A repository of meaning
That speaks of the whole
From which it came
William Blake
To see a World in a grain of sand, all Heaven in a wild flower.
Each enclosure
Is a Temenos
A dedicated space
For contemplation
Opening mind
Expanding consciousness
Enabling comprehension
Of the affinities
That hold together as One
The contained diversity
Of being
Boxes of Dreams
Instruments of Revelation
Cocoons of Meaning
Drawn from the matrix
Each cast of objects
Creates a Theatre in mind
Where outer event
Awakens inner experience
And the silent sounds
Of unspoken narratives
Become occasions for insight
Revelation and delight
Bhagavad Gita
God dwells in the heart of all beings, and his power of wonder moves all things — puppets in a play of shadows, whirling them onwards on the stream of time.