EyeSpy, 2023
Paranoia strikes deep,
Into your life it will creep.
It starts when you’re always afraid.
Step out of line, the men come and take you away.
–– For What It’s Worth, Stephen Stills, 1966
Don’t know if this new painting is about paranoia even though I chose a line on paranoia as the subject for the opening quote. Actually, I might not know what this new small piece means at all.
Maybe it is paranoia, feeling as though there are eyes everywhere, always watching you.
Or maybe it’s more playful, like the childhood game– I spy with my little eye…
Or maybe it’s about the unity of life, about how there is an animating force in all life forms, places, and things.
Or maybe it is little more than a reminder of how I have always tried, beginning in my childhood, to find the shape of eyes and faces in everything I looked at– clouds, the folds of drapes, the leaves in the trees, the pattern in wallpaper, etc.
I just don’t know why this piece fell out at this time and guess it doesn’t really matter in the long run. It has amused me, spooked me, brought back memories and made me think. All I can ask of any piece.
This small 4″ by 4″ painting, EyeSpy, is headed to the West End Gallery for their Little Gems show, opening February 10.
Since I used some lines from the venerable Stephen Stills/ Buffalo Springfield song, For What It’s Worth, to open this post, let’s hear a version of the song from bluegrass icon Del McCoury and friends. Good stuff…
Redtree Times 
What a cool version of the Stills song — spreading out musically through whole new demographics!
Btw, I’m glad you don’t know the meaning of your painting — that ambiguity (and ambivalence) is the main thing. The wobble between paranoia and reciprocity, as all the world’s features return out gaze, arranging themselves into a childlike composition but without shaking off that something dark and heavy :). (Now I feel the same ambivalence about my smiley face there at the end. And so your painting spreads its aura!)
There’s a part of the human brain that is exclusively devoted to recognizing and interpreting faces. Very important to a social species like us. So important, in fact, that we try to see faces even where they wouldn’t logically be — in the bark pattern of a tree, on the front of a car, in a water stain on the ceiling. Your childhood search for eyes and faces was just you letting that part of your brain have free rein.