All birth means separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.
–Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)
The expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All…
The title, Reunion, for this new 36″ x 12″ painting from my June show at the Principle Gallery came long before I was reminded of the passage above from Hesse’s Steppenwolf. But the message comes pretty close to that of both this painting and the Entanglement exhibit as a whole, as I have attempted to describe in recent posts here.
I say attempted because I really don’t know, so my words are often lacking. It is still a mystery to me, one that will remain so until the energy that animates the physical form I temporarily inhabit reunites with the all-encompassing energy of the universe, the All described by Hesse.
It is the mystery of this whole thing that I am trying to capture with much of the work from this upcoming show. The landscapes in these paintings are spare, often small islands or sailboats on the seas or lone trees or houses on wide plains. As in this piece, they are set low in the picture plane in a way that, for me, symbolizes the smallness or insignificance of the ephemeral nature of our existence in relation to the vast and seemingly eternal energy represented by the sky.
My desire was to have the skies, with the rhythm of their patterns and twists and turns, be the focus of these paintings. The idea is to represent a form of energy that seems chaotic from afar yet has motion and rhythm that hopefully becomes apparent to the viewer who takes the time to dwell in these pictures.
I know I have found this work most rewarding. It is a theme that has shown itself in my work over the past decade. In 2016 I did a group of similar work that remains close to my heart. I moved away from it but every time I reviewed that particular work, I found myself asking why. It moves me as much now as when it first emerged. I think these new takes on that theme takes it further and deepens the meaning of it.
Being a mysterious thing, there are certainly questions raised. That’s a good thing, in my opinion. Are there answers to be found? That’s not for me to say. As with most things, the answer is in the individual and where they are in their way through this temporary bit of time and space.
That is, if there are answers at all. Maybe just asking the question is all we need. Maybe it’s the first step in aligning our energy to that great Entanglement with which we will one day be reunited.
Until that time, it shall remain a mystery.
Entanglement opens Friday, June 13 at the Principle Gallery with an Opening Reception from 6-8:30 PM. I will also be giving a Painting Demonstration at the gallery on the following day, Saturday, June 14, from 11 AM until 1 PM.
I wasn’t going to add a song to this post but as I was finishing up a song came to mind that made me laugh. It felt a little goofy and out of place for a fairly serious post but then I thought, why not? The title alone works for me with this painting. Plus, I haven’t shared a lot of Elvis here in recent times. This is Return to Sender.
Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve. 
Redtree Times 