Sommarskymning Painting

I’ve always been fascinated with how nature can claim dominion over all things manmade. Decay and the process of aging are quite beautiful to me. Items rusting and changing as nature’s alchemy coalesces along with time to reorganize and degrade items thought indestructible, intrigues and inspires. Nature simply accepts all eventual change, everything serving is always serving a function, providing a source to help accelerate the next level of growth, change, and decay once again. Man pushes back, cries out, and tries vainly to understand its dominion over all things, both of the natural world and wrought by hand. As I age, and my own body succumbs to the natural ruin that we all experience, I’m struck more and more by how as humans we embrace mythology and the concept of otherworldliness in order to prepare ourselves mentally for a transition. My work marks the transition between the two places; here and the other place, which is whatever the name we affix to “after-life”. It also encompasses how I cope with the inevitability that surrounds my own eventual passage and includes how I now bear witness to mortality. All of my current work is around 3 central themes, the natural state of decay in the world, communication between this world and the “Other” and how the Deer/Elk appears in multiple indigenous cultures as an agent of wisdom, knowledge and as an agent of spiritual communication.