Redtree Times

I’ve done several paintings through the years using textured surface that has bands or strings that twist and turn throughout.  It’s an extreme texture, more pronounced on than my typical surfaces, and, as a result, takes center stage in these pieces.  They become the driving force in the painting.

These bands that run through these paintings always spur something in me, some sense of wonder at the great unknowns of our world and universe.  The new painting shown here, Here There Everywhere, certainly does this for me.  Looking at it, I am filled with questions about the world or worlds that lie just past our perceptions.  Are there other dimensions, other pasts and futures swirling around us at any moment?  And if so, are we connected in some way to this web of chaotic energy or are we merely physical beings, unwitting bystanders in the great dance of the universe?

In this painting, the Red Tree serves as the questioner, living in the moment but recognizing the forces that permeate everything and give that moment a discernible depth and meaning beyond the simple beauty it can physically observe.  I know that I have had that feeling.  I might be out driving and see a certain curve of a field, a bend of a tree or the filtering light from the sun and suddenly feel an intense emotional response that seems to have no basis of origin in my past , one so strong that I find myself asking why and where it came from.

Perhaps this indefinable emotional is a brush with these other worlds, these energy forces?

I certainly don’t know.  Part of me wishes it to be so but part of me simply wants to savor that moment and emotion without questioning it.  Something to ponder on a gray autumn morning.

This painting, Here There Everywhere, is a 24″ by 30″ canvas and is part of my show, Into the Common Ground, at the Kada Gallery in Erie, PA which opens in early December.