"Awakened" Liberte Réveillé Painting

The immediate demands of human civilization, competing with one another for my attention, sometimes obscure my sense of connectedness to the larger natural world, as well as to my connectedness with myself. My work in my art is to rediscover and renew that connection. But to renew the connection, i must also stay outside it enough to understand and capture it, if I can, as an artist. Not long ago, I wrote this poem: Solitary and magical moments at the shores of the Potomac River I learned tracking the footsteps of deer, majestic familiar silhouette forest dweller that my eyes and heart have seen and felt through many season. Dampness, wet and cold I bask in the serenity of being one – shy and reserved blue heron camouflaging/revealing my presence at once a the river. Above my brothers flying away I hear their callings up above me. My soul soars and my heart beckons that moment of departure to be one with all. In the twilight and stillness. Noisy cackling call of crows shatter the sacred silence admonishing to live is to paint and love this earth and everyone fleeting moments that is all what my life is. This is what my spirit and soul has learned in at the shores of the Potomac River.” I look for inspiration to Gauguin, whose art manifests both his need for connection to a more fundamental, natural, “primitive” world, and his artist’s perspective on that need, which creates a kind of distancing. He shows us what it means to be human — to be both profoundly connected to nature and to stand outside that connection, trying observe it, and trying to communicate it to others. Gauguin was inspired to somehow connect with, yet also capture, the kind of direct relationship to the natural world that he witnessed invarious communities of French Polynesia and other non-western cultures. Gauguin treated his painting as a philosophical meditation on this ultimate dualism of human existence, as well as the possibility of spiritual fulfillment even as one reaches out to live closer to nature. This is why my current work—focusing on our dualistic observation of animals and sense of connection to them— is so driven by Gauguin’s pioneering efforts in Primitivism. Gauguin captured the late19th-century Western partially alienated, partially connected fascination for less industrially-developed cultures. He could not help expressing the romantic notion that non-Western people might be more genuinely spiritual, or closer in touch with elemental forces of the cosmos, than their comparatively "artificial" European and American counterparts. My own work aspires to be build on Gauguin's insights and to take them a step further. I want to my work to illustrate and manifest the ways in which our observations of nature and animals spirals into our simultaneous connection with nature and animals, no matter where we are. That spiraling, dualistic, independent connection is reflected in the very molecular structure of our DNA.