Serpent Skin Painting

Note: This painting is on a canvas panel. I do not plan my paintings because I sense them noetically. I discern the works passively as memories from the future. Discovering and manifesting a painting feels like I’m a blind man being led by a river — I can discern the river in so many ways, but I can’t see the river. I intuitively perceive the painting the whole time, but I only see the painting once it’s complete. In the extended mind my art practice begins. I view our minds as a morphing field that expands into other sympathetic minds or fields to inherit their experiences, (morphic resonance). Our minds then become a curated, collective space. For me, a potential painting's field exists as a template created by a unique nexus in this morphic network my mind has stretched into. To sense a painting I use a non-verbal thought process to explore this matrix and resonate a painting’s field. As I encounter each piece of the painting's field I can apply the information I perceive onto the canvas. This first step can appear as a color, texture, technique, composition, medium, location, armature etc. After applying the first step, I can then incorporate what happened on the canvas into the painting's field to repeat the process until the work is complete. What occurs through the paint is a language of teleportation. Each brushstroke is my direct thought, housed. With those thoughts being non-verbal, the paint acts as the communication device to an experience. Upon seeing the art, the viewer’s mind resonates. Depending on the parts of the work targeted, the viewer is transported to similar locations of my mind-space that formed the painting’s field. When the viewer travels to these locations they add their corresponding mind-spaces, and the world of the painting begins to grow. The artwork becomes a launch pad into my curated, collective mind-space and a point of synthesis with viewer’s minds. There’s an old notion that angels are just ideas floating in the ether waiting to embody a prepared mind. I often think of some of the abstract marks on my paintings in this way — that they are idea filled forms waiting to embody a ready consciousness. I don’t think the idea-forms are dualistic, where they can be defined as something and not something else. They are subjective. The idea-forms connect infinitely to webs of thought-spaces to be explored. They become concepts in the realm of the felt intellect, ideas that permeate the mind through experiencing. In connecting to this old view of supernatural beings, the abstract marks become an angelic language. My goals in painting these idea-forms is to open up a world of shared mind-space to experience the subtle energies in ourselves, nature, and each other. This transcends thoughts of self, tangling them into feedback loops of time, place, and others. My work contains a heavy nature influence which acts as a mirror linking us to the various life cycles found within nature. Slipping in and out of the familiar through abstract mark making, I draw parallels between nature and human nature within my paintings. My shapes coalesce into landscape and figure, eventually dissipating into abstract impressions. The brush stroke becomes a vortex for multiple forms or ideas. My hope is that viewers will encounter their inner realities by engaging the work's limbo state. Within this innate reflection, I question the potential fears and inspirations, the knowns and unknowns the observers might meet in themselves. This interaction simulates the sublime that landscape painting aspires to. It offers the viewer a choice or perhaps a door to the unrevealed, and in that choice I hope a piece of the viewer’s inner-landscape manifests.