opit.eray Print

I was born in the USA; grew up in Michigan and California. I studied painting, performance and film at the University of California, San Diego, and completed graduate coursework in film production/ animation/ and SFX at San Francisco State University. As a young boy, I remember making my first drawing of a bird in flight, burning and covered in orange and red flames. Symbolic of my early childhood I suppose. Later I made more drawings and paintings, mostly representational, of the things and people around me, then, eventually moved completely towards my/ the subconscious for images-ideas of expressive abstraction. Before moving to Brasil four years ago, I exhibited my paintings, drawings, and films in galleries and festivals in California, Washington, Michigan and New York. In Florianopolis, where I now live, I teach workshops on painting and drawing using intuitive techniques, and have had several exhibitions of my paintings and drawings (individual and group in Florianopolis and Rio do Sul). A few thoughts on what my art process means to me: - It brings me harmonious balance and growth - what is this life if not an extremely durable and fragile, mental and psycho-spiritual, personal experience of questions and answers. And to know each moment in each breath as a piece of memory ‘from’. - Do the places I depict in my art really exist? I think I am making an attempt at constructing a form of existence based on what was and what will be, via emotional energies and ‘intuitive looking’. - I don’t believe there ever was a beginning and never will be an end - only light, energy, and potential to be existing in this physical form temporarily; an ever-evolving process of infinite continuity. The where and the from of what is living is, has been, and will be the mystery, averting all logic completely. For me, this ‘mystery’ (of the unknown, the ‘chaotic’) is discoverable through self reference/ identification and emotional awareness. - In creating my art I can choose to feel all feelings transparently and with intensity, and I allow myself at times to move further and further inward. This is where I begin to find the images I reconstruct of ‘energy’, birthing matrices’, ‘minerals’, and ‘physical forms’.