Perception…

I’m tempted to go into great detail as to why I haven’t written here for the past three years but I think I wouldn’t be revealing anything earth shattering. I switched jobs; that’s about it.

One thing I have done is kept painting and have somewhat switched direction. Not entirely, but enough to make it interesting. I took a workshop a couple of years back where we abstracted the landscape. Im not used to abstracting the landscape. My work is representational. Trees are meant to look somewhat like trees and water is supposed to look somewhat like water. The painting I did in the workshop steps away from that. You can tell that they’re trees and some grass and some other elements but not rendered laboriously with the intent to make them look like their bark and sap counterparts.

I had some success with that piece and as you can see it’s not exactly what I normally paint. What I’ll tell you though, is that it was very eye opening and a hell of a lot of fun. There is a part of me that has always wanted to work in this direction. To open myself up to the inner sanctum of what drives this creativity. The hot fire that sits somewhere in a labyrinth so deep within me that only my subconscious self has gotten close. I want to go there. It would be an epic journey.

I often think about things like reflections and radio waves. It’s amazing to me to think that all around me are things that I can’t see or understand, but with the right piece of equipment, you can tune into a comedy show or all 80’s all the time. I used to live in Vancouver and we would go to Science World where they had a Cloud Chamber; it showed you cosmic rays that were coming from space and travelling through the atmosphere and through the roof of the center, and then through me then revealed by the chamber. When I look out a train window and see the world going by and then adjust my focus slightly, I see the train car and its riders. A shift in perception. Tuning into something that exists but was undetected. I wonder if that can be achieved in art. Move away from the obvious and let yourself become aware of possible other plains or areas within that have never been explored.

That’s what this path is. A shift in perception. And with that shift; maybe a little closer to that fire.