This week, I am in northern WI spending some time in a cabin painting. While here for a week, I am taking much-needed time to look, to reflect, and to see. This morning as I was out for my walk, I became aware that my work over the years has always been about this moment that I was experiencing. Walking down a gravel road, looking down, hearing the birds, looking right and left - watching the forest sIowly pass me by - one stride at a time. I was looking out - peering through the underbrush into the forest. I remember as a child, my father asking me to look into the woods as we were driving. "Look for deer' he would say, and my brother Curtis and I would look out into the forests and pasture land of northern Minnesota or Wisconsin. We would log miles and hours looking out into the passing landscape. My father was always the best at this, spotting even the smallest movement or patch of grey-brown in the distance, the ditch, or amongst the trees. My brother and I would marvel when our father would even spot the small reflections of eyes in the ditches at night. The landscape would pass us by, and our minds would wander - eventually to slumber in the back seat of our Chevy Impala station wagon.
I am always looking. I enjoy peering through the forest of trees, or out toward the passing pasturelands as I drive. I find a significant amount of happiness, and solitude when I look outward into the distance. This simple act has had a profound impact on me. I have grown to understand this simple act of looking out - has fueled most of my artistic investigations. My paintings are for me places where I can layer up patterns and structures to create avenues and passages into depth. The gaps, negative spaces, and overlapping patterns create a mysterious environment to explore, to wander into.
My wandering into the distance- through the landscape of my native Minnesota, has helped me to realize that as I am looking outward, my mind often portages inward. The act of looking outward, is mirrored - and I have grown to rely on these self reflective moments. I seek them out, and have worked to reproduce them in my paintings over the years. These new works are mandalas about this inward/outward experience. I hope they are assemblages where someone may be compelled to look, to question, and to experience an act of visual passage.
