River of My Art

“Art is highest form of hope.”

-Gerhard Richter

Life is a mystery. As an artist, I have found it essential to embrace the mystery. I have been drawing since I could hold a pencil. So I guess you could say, I didn’t choose art, art chose me. It is impossible for me to imagine a life without making art. Art is a vehicle of human expansion and evolution of consciousness.. My art reveals things inside me that need to be shared. And even more, it provides a portal or conduit for ideas and creations that are from a source that is much bigger than me.

THE ENIGMA

It has been more than four decades since an enigma came to me through my art. I discovered it quite by accident. I happened to pick up one of my sketch books from the year prior and as I flipped through, I noticed these doodled stick figures scattered throughout the pages. They seemed to be connected somehow, so I drew them out in a horizontal line. That is when I saw something astonishing. The stick figures were telling a story. This was completely unintentional and that is why I was so struck by it. They flowed like a dance. There was movement in each one of them and there was a sense of flow from one to the next. Although I didn’t really understand it completely, I could feel it and I knew instinctively that it wasn’t complete. As I looked at the ten figures in a row, I could see that there needed to be at least one more figure for it be complete. Since these figures symbols had come to me from an unconscious unintentional source, I knew I couldn't just invent another figure on my own. I kept hoping it would come to me, but nothing. Some time passed and one day I was watching an episode of my favorite television program at the time. It was called, Fame. It was a series about a dance school. There was a scene where the character played by Debbie Allen (the amazing dancer and choreographer) was dancing her heart out alone in a studio. She struck a pose for a split second as she started across the floor and that was it! The missing figure. I immediately sketched it out and it became the 11th and final figure to complete what I would later title Seasons of the Soul.

A LIFE OF ITS OWN

Seasons of the Soul Is a pictographic story of transformation and becoming. It reflected my own inner struggles with self-acceptance and identity during the time it was created. Over time I began to realize the artwork revealed natural cycles in my life. Other people identified with it in regards to their own lives. I began creating original watercolor and ink paintings with the figures in a horizontal line. In some of them, I started adding subtitles under the figures. Some people requested the artwork to be made without the subtitles as they preferred to interpret their own meaning for each figure. Others preferred the subtitles. Over time some of the subtitles have been changed but the figures remain true to how they originally came to being.