Active Meditation
1991

Painting is confrontation not escape.  It is the concentration of the soul, heart and mind to labor and to create. It is looking at reality with all its horrors, miseries, tragedies, and injustices and mirroring that reality by focusing on one, or many, of its aspects in each work.  It is taking the chaos of Indifference and the intolerance of Pursuit and narrowing it down to make a statement.

Painting is the action I take when I meditate on Life and Death, Good and Evil, Truth and Beauty, Man and his world.. and his God. Spiritually and sensuality are elements of my work.  They take expression in the idea (subject) as much as in its embodiment (technique).

• "Your painting is sad. It is too sad. It is horrifying."
• "Well my dear, the brightest light in my paintings is darkness when compared to the dimmest light of reality."

Of course the sun is bright and the light is shining beautifully.  The tragedy is that we are not able to se that we are in darkness and to distinguish the light from the dark. We are all painters in our own ways because of our mastery of painting white what is black and vice-versa.  Politicians do it best. They are painters par excellence.

Do not fear artist!  Trust the voice that sends you. Do not fear to face the darkness ahead of you and to bring it into light. By painting the darkness you expose to the light and it will horrify the distracted, the blinded, and the hypocrite.