Thunderbird Returns Painting

I was scanning the internet back in the early 2000’s when I came upon a site with a number of interesting images of Thunderbirds. The image from this painting struck me not only as it visually resonated with me, but also because of the accompanying dialectic that ascribed its discovery to some hick colonist back in the nineteenth century. I appreciated this as an opportunity to recover authorship of this image as someone of aboriginal background and bias. Originally an Untitled work intended to restrict the meaning of this work to people whose culture would give them access. It is now a celebration of this lost image’s repatriation. Spirals in my paintings are meant to connect them with a common thread not unlike the use of the circle in the work of Richard Long (my favorite contemporary artist), but my hope is that they convey a deeper universal meaning. All cultures that write first make spirals. If one sees spirals in ancient images they are usually meant to convey star maps. The following is an excerpt from my short story The Miracle Man: A giant hole like a huge black baleful eye glared up at the sun from the sparkling waters of the Pacific. Water coursed and twisted in the form of a giant spiraling whirlpool down into a dark dead shark eyed abyss at the sky above it. It looked just like the one over the drain in the bathtub only really huge! Spirals are indicative of some the greatest and smallest things in the universe. For instance look at the tip of one’s fingers and there is a spiral. If one looks to the microscopic level one can see that the structure of DNA is a kind of spiral. Look outward: hurricanes those vast storm systems whose spiraling sets in motion dangerous energies. Looking out farther one can find that the structure of galaxies are spirals. Intriguingly the spin imparted to water spiraling down a drain is derived from the Coriolis Effect. That is to say that because the earth spins the water also spins. The earth is in a state of constant grinding pressure as a result of its outer crust residing atop a molten inner core. Heat rising in vast convection plumes causes the crust: a series of enormous interconnected plates, to move against one another. This titanic struggle is for the most part so slow as to deceive the uneducated into believing it is in fact static. The inner core of the earth is composed of liquid iron and is heated by uranium and other radioactive elements. The core of the earth spins in one direction and the mantle and crust spin in the opposite creating a humongous dynamo who’s magnetic field extends beyond the planet. This field in turn shields all life from the intense radiation of the sun. The plates of the earth’s crust called tectonic plates smash together and either slide against one another as in the case of the San Andreas Fault or one plate can slide underneath the other and then begin the slow process of being reabsorbed by the earth. Giant plates of the earth’s crust slide past and under each other in a grinding struggle that is often arrested by the way they mesh in a random and unyielding fashion. This can stop the plate’s movement for centuries causing a buildup of energy of enormous potential pulling the upper section down until finally one day the obstruction breaks and the upper plate snaps back elastically. The resultant release of energy is comparable to nuclear weapons but on a far larger scale. Just such a tectonic event occurred of the east cost of Japan on March 11, 2011. Referred to as the Tohoku Earthquake it was an underwater megathrust earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0 that lasted six minutes. This event in addition to triggering a giant tsunami that caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people and human destruction on an unbelievable scale, also was so powerful as to cause Japan to move two metres to the east, the earth’s axis to shift, and the rotation speed of the planet to slow (longer days). Imagine the earth as a kind of mechanism intimately tied to the celestial systems in which it resides. For instance just as the earth’s magnetic field shield’s us from dangerous solar rays so too does the sun’s own magnetosphere shield the solar system from cosmic radiation. All these quakes all this energy: this time it all adds up. This time it unlocks something that had slept for millions of years. That was the last time the earth was aligned with the cosmos in just this way. Its axis just so many degrees; the orbital plane of the solar system wobbling just so. Like the tumblers in a lock on a safe; when the correct combination of numbers is entered the pins align and a door opens. After the tsunami Japanese TV broadcast images of the huge whirlpool spiraling down into the pacific. The waters were rushing back down to fill the void displaced by a giant section of tectonic plate suddenly rebounding upward from the ocean floor. Five or six spiral arms intertwined and spun water dizzyingly down into a big hole in the center. Tons of foamy water and spray twisted streaming and plunging deep into the Pacific Ocean. It stared blackly back at the camera; big enough to swallow ships. It was mysterious and not only powerful, but signaled that something powerful had awakened as well. Spirals are a powerful common denominator in human consciousness and may indeed be indicative of nature’s most powerful forces: Atomic particles produced by particle accelerators like CERN leave tell-tale signs for physicists to interpret that happen to be spirals.

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:108 W x 72 H x 1 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.