There are no memorials here...

Watching a recent series about pirates, there was a moving scene between the captain and his first mate...
The first mate, beleaguered by the captain's dreams of riches, wealth and piratical utopia, launches a beautiful retort to the measure of stating that pirates, by nature, are claimed by the sea are at the mercy of the waters and uncertainty its bounty...that over time all is erased and there dreams/schemes will all be buried at the bottom of the ocean to be wiped away..."there are no memorials here" he states...

Somehow this seemingly throw away line has struck a chord...in the quest of painting and of life....what is it that we try to capture?? What do we hope that we are leaving behind?? What, if anything, are we speaking of when we mark, paint and explore the world in this way....'

Often I seem to wobble between being completely inspired and almost reaching the point of chucking it all in...never knowing why or what it is that I am actually doing...why all these fucking landscapes/mountains/clouds/skies...why do they plague me?? why won't they leave me alone???

In some ways, over the years, I have felt the need or urgency to paint things I do not understand...like ideas and stories come unbidden and all I must do is listen and make a little space for them to unravel...without knowing it, this dialogue in a stupid tv series has hit the nail on the head...these paintings serve as some testament to the past, to the un-witnessed passings...to the untold stories of the fallen...as an epitaph of all that lies underground and underwater...fathomless numbers who have created the paths for us to travel in the glimpse of this moment...

Perhaps paintings are monuments to the truth...perhaps they are the memorials to that which we do not understand and what calls us to the creative endeavor...perhaps there is no easy way of giving meaning or purpose...perhaps, as the pirate suggests, we are all passing moments to be claimed and forgotten...
If so, then, i give it up to the greater and decide to scribe my little old bones while they sing and listen intently to those that have sung before...and I will be a land pirate in search of the treasure that lies in the folds of these mountains...

New Work...2015.

                                                                  *  *  *  *  *  *