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“In abstraction reality is preserved. We find a bridge to the experience of reality. A way of mastering the conflict that is the stuff of life with all ones senses, of tracking down its meaning, while striving for supreme development.
The power of creativity cannot be named. It remains utterly mysterious. What does not shake us to our foundations is no mystery. Down to our finest particles we ourselves are charged with this power. We cannot formulate its essence but we can in some measure move towards its source.”*
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One way I explain my paintings is in terms of a contemplation of underlying concepts behind the scientific ideas that ‘catch’ my imagination and trigger them.
I do not depict the concepts and ideas I reference literally.
My external framework is strongly research based and analytical. However my internal creative focus is on the mysterious, unconscious and spiritual world (which I happen to access through scientific concepts and knowledge). A third element in my somewhat triangulated approach is the development of a technical visual vocabulary.
This is my preparation process.
When I paint, I put aside this world of learned and conscious knowledge and access some much older, vague and ill-defined awareness that interacts with a sense of a fundamental question which drives my creative and intellectual quest.
When I paint, I choose to let my learned knowledge go and simply interact with, play and trust what I find and encounter.
“Are life and mind irrelevant to the structure of the universe
or central to it?”**
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*Paul Klee, The thinking eye, (trans. R. Manheim), ed..J. Spiller, The Documents of Modern Art Series, Vol. 15, George Wittenborn Inc., New York, revised edition, 1964.
** John A. Wheeler , (1911-2008), Theoretical Physicist, Princeton University.
A painting is an exploration of my internal world of half formed thoughts, ideas and questions that preoccupy and recur; that prompt a never ending quest for individual and shared knowledge and understanding.
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