Not long ago I had the good fortune of living, for about a year, amongst the overgrown fields and forests in the Hudson River Valley. I walked through the trail less forests on a regular basis. I gravitated towards the sounds of streams and brooks because those were the places that held for me an absorbing significance. Somehow, the invisible sylvan energies I sought aligned themselves along these woodland waterways. *These settings attract a greater degree of wildlife (Than the rest of the forest…) One day, whilst meandering through the underbrush I happened upon an enormous hoary oak growing out of the middle of a stream — a solitary remnant of the old growth forest once covering the entire continent—for an unknown reason spared from the woodcutter’s axe. Its trunk loomed over the stream that slipped around it. Water had slipped around it for so long, it had formed two miniature cataracts that mirrored each other on either side of the tree. The sound they created was beautiful in its simple perpetuity. Eureka! I had found IT; that rare confluence of space and sound and time that somehow I could translate into creative expression. *That slow, steady inexorable growth of the ancient oak extending towards the firmament (overlapping circles and cycles etc…) The transcendence created by this dynamic between tree and stream inspires me to manifest this uplifting experience into a work of art. This interplay between physical and metaphysical phenomenon kindled the spiritual sparks within me, the origin of a creative axis around which my art revolves. This was inspiration.
            Painting a mere picture of this tree and stream is, quite simply, unproductive. Why not photograph it? Then what? There are already too many nature photographs of unusual trees and streams. As an inspired individual, the artist should seek to examine the experience of inspiration to its intrinsic foundation and effect a procedure to achieve a finished expression on canvas. This is a complex challenge.  Important artwork *sidesteps and outshines that which is predictable or contrived, or baser yet artwork that relies on shock value. Prodigious amounts of artwork lean feebly on these devices. The urge of the artist to shed light on injustices and the oversimplified mandate for Art to address them is pedestrian in its ubiquity. Igniting a controversial debate is not my motive. I have little patience for argument. I work towards presenting a concept of beauty that is—as of yet—unfamiliar. I eschew literality in an attempt to remove the distortions of individuality and ideology. Are the esthetics of beauty universally familiar? Controversy? Irony? The landscape? Illusory tricks of perspective? The portrait? The nude? The assumption Art can and should reveal itself in familiar terms is the hallmark of conventional thinking.
            I’ve had many of these tree and stream experiences, ranging from high desert snow storms to disheveled trailers isolated deep within the swamps of the everglades. Invariably these moments are short lived and uncommon yet achieve permanence if only in memory, becoming further saturated when viewed through the lens of retrospect, appearing vivid and humming with energy; each specific yet extensive like a dream state glimpse of infinity. Infinity is black, also blue as well as white and within this spectrum the endless audible hum of space and time. A surrogate description of a principle under the image of another.
            In the studio these conceptual raw materials are put into motion; originating from a stockpile of specifics. However I favor indirectness, avoiding the tangles of a conceptual Gordian Knot. I prefer imagery less obvious and on the periphery, as if my ideas were not illuminated by direct sunlight, rather within the shadowy edges of consciousness and perception, within the phantasmagoria where dreams and daydreams appear and unravel. The idea developed in this twilight is more likely to stimulate those recesses of the mind enabled to drift outside the brightly lit reality; beyond the grind of the prosaic. Indirectness buffers against redundancy and in turn unfetters the artist from repeating imagery in a delusional quest to affect a signature style. Tree and stream materialize in parabolic form and * externalize that curious splashing ellipse.
            Because of this interest in the phantasmagoric, one might accuse me of pursuing artistic expression with the building blocks of irrational subject matter. In fact, my mind’s eye and the interior world it surveys, delights in the inextricable nature of two overlapping realities: objective reality tinted by subjective reality. If I were an imagist, principally concerned with rational subject matter, my choice of subject matter would obviously be limited. From my perspective, these limitations relegate imagery derived from familiar subject matter to a shallow profile, unable to engage the viewer’s awareness on levels that require introspection and deep analysis. I am not qualified to discuss metaphysics as a philosopher and I am not interested in engaging in mystical polemics. An abiding concept for me is that the irrational bears the same relationship to the rational that the Unknown bears to the Known, thus binding the interaction of subjective reality upon objective reality. Our Age of Information is fast moving, unpredictable and often harsh. The propensity for technological achievements to increase at an accelerated rate and display characteristics of sparkling intelligence are only deceptively concrete. As a result, assembling constructs that engage and confront the Unknown or unquantifiable are repeatedly and summarily dismissed. I believe that the Unknown—viewed as the source of knowledge, as the*( Perhaps an article such as “an” would be more appropriate as it is less specific than “the”) object of thought, is an unequivocal portion of the dynamic nature of the Known. It is the Unknown that excites the minds of the scholars, which, in the Known alone would atrophy with boredom. The Unknown possesses seductive qualities more powerful and more profound than those of the Known, even though some reject such consideration; except by only the most celebrated philosophers. Yet I continuously encounter the Unknown always behind and beyond the Known, giving it the appearance, at best, of shadows.
            Integrating this philosophical backdrop with creativity presents an alluring challenge that fuels my primary artistic engines. The tree and stream and the ongoing stockpile of similarly engaging phenomena are, in the long run, seemingly abstract and run the risk of being dismissed as inconsequential. But how often we forget, aligning our focus to the mundane yet rationalized business of “getting ahead”, or focusing on the narrow confines of subject matter, that we ignore the profound nuances swirling in our midst; a complex ether. My artistic purpose is to transcribe that ether and to reason it from simple elements of thought into a complex whole, from cause to effect, from a principle to its application. Within the tree and stream the relationship between water, gravity, stone, earth, and the living xylem and phloem is not thesis met by antithesis in an intellectual vacuum. There exists a real time intersection of compliments that speaks of the anonymous flow of the universe.
            My current series Beyond Visual Range consists of twenty six square canvases that are interrelated and simultaneously singularly independent of each other. These paintings include both recognizable perspectival landscapes and pure abstraction. Combining these elements compels the viewer to access their own intuitive comprehension of time and space within an expansive and unempirical calculus. The tree and stream juxtaposed with pure space suffused with presence (color) provides the vehicle for meditation upon a vast and boundless scale; a conduit for an august vision. I attempt to bestow some traction on these ineffable experiences that fall in front of me like rain and snow. I want to embrace that stream coursing around that tree and realize some sort of oblique rapture.