1) Best teachers in the world! Rogier van der Weyden taught me to make every detail count. Poussin taught me to seek a vibrant stillness. Matisse taught me to compose art like music.
2) On the first page of this website you'll find six books celebrating myth and imagination. These books say a lot, yet words can go only so far.
3) What are my paired images about? Each diptych finds its own subject(s), but all explore human consciousness -- what we observe, what we remember, and how the two mix.
4) Many viewers are drawn at once to shiny objects and famous names. Relatively few are drawn to art that matters. True art arrests the eye, engages the mind, inspires the soul.
5) I work deliberately, out of respect for the past, but with urgency, out of respect for the future. It took me thirty years to form these diptychs. Can you spare three minutes?
6) Every creator has a moral responsibility to make art worthy of the name. You can't wake up deciding you're going to be original. You can wake up deciding to do your best.
7) Art making is the most vital thing we do, an assertion of our humanity, a cri de coeur against death. "...for here there is no place that does not see you."
Collaboration
You, the viewer, are my collaborator in creating art. The work isn't finished until you see it and respond to it.
This is especially true for art made in a new way, and seen for the first time. No one told you what to expect or whether the piece is worth your effort. You bring fresh eyes, along with your own taste and experience.
May I, as your co-creator, make a few suggestions?
Embrace the triangles. Yes, they might seem an odd way to view the world (or to recreate it), but note the sub-groups they form within each group of twenty. Try looking at them in sets of five or four or six.
Focus for a time on the black interstices, the thin crisscross lines, the larger, nearly hexagonal nodes. Occasionally these can feel more compelling than the colorful windows they frame.
Step back and look at the diptych whole - both sides together - for its overall shapes, its overall patterns, its overall colors. Then look at each side separately, but in relation to the other. How do they connect?
When you look at details, try not to imagine what I may have been thinking or feeling as I made them. What are you thinking or feeling as you see them?
Please keep in mind that "slow art" requires nurturing by both creators. But what a pleasure to watch it grow!