Every artist talks about their Muse. A Muse is a person, a feeling, an overriding emotion, a political position, a conflict or something that starts the creative process going. When I was in my teens I painted a lot of florals. Why? because I could buy flowers in a shop and plop them in a vase and paint them in my basement. When I got a car I widened my horizons and my Muse was landscapes. I would take tons of photos and develop them as subjects for my works. When I went to Italy in 1971, my Muse was the European culture and art that captured me. My works have different meanings. There is a watercolor over pen and ink of an abandoned farm house in the middle of a field surrounded by woods in the winter. I took that photo sometime in 1970 while on a ski trip with a bunch of friends. When my father died on Valentines Day 1973 I spent the entire day drawing the scene. It gave me something to do. It also let me express the loneliness and isolation I felt that day, although it took me years to relate them together. My Compression paintings were also made to express the same thoughts. The weight of the world was coming down on me. You might look at it and say how interesting without understanding the hidden emotion that was my Muse for the work.
My latest works have a new Muse: Transcendental Meditation. I love coming up with themes that relate to Clear Consciousness. The Emergence of a Thought is a three panel vertical piece that takes me through my subconscious where there is clarity and unity. The painting follows the emergence of a bubble of sorts as it pierces from the unconscious mind to the conscious mind. Tree of Life is a collage in three vertical panels that has three themes: Divinity, Creation and Humanity. I will let you examine it to figure them out for yourself. Transcendence is another three panel horizontal work that represents the beauty of Clear Consciousness, where the Universe is at once vast and contained in all that lives and breathes. Sometimes there are stretches of time where the Muse simply disappears. I don’t force it, and I resort to creating pleasant little plein air scenes to keep my skills sharp. That is the beauty of creating art. It isn’t a job, it is a thing of joy.
