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 it 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 astounding. 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.