Abstractions and Metaphors
Among our global challenges I'm often inspired by the intersections of science and culture, where so called 'facts' and the deeper mysteries within us collide. Hence my 'non-liniar' output. My aim is to create works which raise questions from the invisible through abstractions and metaphors. Being intuitive, I play with hints, suppositions and the margins of being as I go after the mystery. Can truth become a formula or does it die when placed upon a forced march by external demands?
For example, due to recent discoveries, scientists are speculating that it might be possible for something to be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Aspects of popular culture has long promoted this concept, such as Dr Who's Targis, Mary Poppin's bag, Felix the Cat's magic bag of tricks and many others. Jules Verne's and George MacDonald's books fortold these days. We are all really children pretending to be adults.
Scientists are saying that some 'regions' of spacetime have that property. Indeed, the concept of redeeming your timeline is beginning to emerge. Is the space time continuum flexible, even fluid to change?
Since my youth I've been a stranger on a strangely beautiful world. The deeper mysteries of creation pose far more questions than proven facts. That drove me into books, such as Buckminster Fuller's Ideas and Intengrities and George Steiner's Language and Silence.
Contradictions are important, as they can lead us to greater truths. For example, decades ago I worked in military intelligence in the midst of the Vietnamese refugee crisis in the Philippines. My hidden work led to being selected for the Blue Angels flight team for four very public years. What a shift in my identity and ideas! As a consequence, my work was exposed to a global audience. I got a fat head for a time...ho ho ho.
Yet all of that fell away after leaving the military. Then, 32 years ago, I entered another radical shift when I was in NYC on the art scene's fast track, where I found the scene to be more prediatory than Panama's jungles. After a year, I bypassed a budding international career and returned to Baltimore. My collectors thought I'd lost my mind. Yet, more and more I needed the space and peace and serenity of my half acre of gardens to regather my wits and my integrity.
At that time I was facing many self-contradictions. Gradually I softened my relentless self promotion and the toil of shows in order to be free and push into a deepening exploration. After a few testy years, I began to connect those contradictions and realized there was an arc building towards a coherent understanding. In creating unique bodies of work, I gained a freedom moving between 2-D to 3-D to performances and videos and back. A more authentic confidence emerged.
Now I'm on the move again, seasoned to deal with new horizons.