The painting below, from a few years back, came back to me a while ago and has been living with me in the studio. In the time it has been here it has become one of my favorites. I find myself scouring it with my eyes on a regular basis, going up and down, letting my eyes follow the path and the lines of the landscape. Trying to look into the mirror-like pools or the moon, half expecting to see myself looking back from the surface. I have really fixated on this piece and thought I would put it back into a gallery again, to see if it had anything on someone else that it had on me. So it is at the West End Gallery for a bit. Here’s what I wrote about it a few years back:
There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. What we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish.
–Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
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I tend to agree with the snippet above from the Chuck Palahniuk book, Survivor.
Everything is built upon pattern. Who we are and how we behave. History. Science. Music and art. It is all dictated by patterns.
Most of us don’t dwell too long on identifying patterns in the world around us and some of us will even refuse to acknowledge the predominance of pattern in the world, believing everything is random and chaotic. I suppose that in itself is part of a pattern, a larger one that is so encompassing that we can’t see it from our vantage point within it.
Just speculating there, of course.
Maybe even trying to break away from the pattern is actually part of the pattern.
All I know is that I am always looking for pattern, even when I’m not really looking. I call it pattern, rhythm, flow, sense of rightness and other terms, without knowing why I am drawn to this concept. It just attracts me in that it is so much part of everything that there must surely be significance.
All of this flowed forward with this new painting, a 4″ by 17″ piece on paper that I’m calling Part of the Pattern. It’s based on a theme I’ve used several times recently of pools rising through a tall vertical picture plane like ladder rungs. This particular piece was so much more stylized in its forms that it really became more about pattern than subject. I see it both as a landscape and as some sort of underlying pattern that makes up the landscape. A sort of DNA-like structure on which the world is built. Whatever it is, it holds my eye and makes me keep searching for something in it.
Redtree Times 
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