1990
If someone were to ask me how I see myself, how best to describe my work, and myself my response would be "as a mystic." I am a man in search of the numinous, that which cannot be defined or understood by the rational mind.
Like Arthur's admonition to his knights as they began their quest for the Grail, "Let each of you enter the forest at that point which you choose, where it is darkest and there is no way or path", it is to my inner forest that I journey as an artist to meet and struggle with my creative daemon. Here I am confronted with the terrible wholeness of my being, all of its light and shadow, not intellectually, but as feeling, wholly experienced by the body. It is out of this feeling that the symbols for my pieces arise.
Each piece begins as a blank, an emanation from the void, against which my logical/rational mind, intent on control, rebels constantly. The range of emotions I confront when creating my work runs from elation to despair, power to helplessness, fear, joy, anomie and many others. To the extent I can feel and acknowledge what it is I am feeling, then I can remain in contact with this inner place beyond the will. It is as if I have hooked onto a huge fish under the sea of my subconscious and am slowly playing it out, running with the flood of feeling and thoughts as they come, slowly the fish is brought in. It is a struggle in every sense, a struggle to unite with my deeper self. It is out of this mystic struggle that my work emerges. In a sense the work creates itself, wishes to express itself through me. I don't begin work on a piece until I can feel that something inside of me wants to emerge. I don't know what it is but the feeling of something growing, wanting to be expressed, is unmistakable in me and the piece will lead me to its own conclusion, it will tell me when it is done.