This art is from my spiritual development period of 1980 to the present.

This art is from my spiritual development period of 1980 to the present.

In this period I have been palpably moved by the insight that 'there is no factual knowledge of what happens to human beings after material death' This basic insight has not stopped but indeed engendered humans from fantasizing thousands of answers to that question. The answers that we do not participate or believe in, we call 'mythology'. The fantasy produced answers that we believe in and practice, we call our 'faith'. Every mythology - including the ones we currently hold- has a 'god' as its anchor. This anchor takes the belief system out of the material world of everyday human activity and places it in a 'spiritual' realm that is beyond human control and acts as a moral reference point for the society that believes in that mythology. The belief and acceptance of these mythologies, again, including the ones we currently hold, is 'proven' by miraculous events and special people, such as prophets, messiahs, saints, etc. - all these special creatures are avatars and are said to be able to mediate between ordinary humans and their god because they have been chosen by 'god' to do so. When I came to fully feel this insight it was incorporated into my visual and literary art and I had no need to explore the usual spiritual themes as our world's current mythologies. I do believe that there is an existence after marterial death because of millennia of experiences that hint at it, but I don't believe that it is a 'place' but rather a 'dimension'. I believe that humans are not 'body and  soul' but multi-dimensional beings that continue to grow as humans after this  current material dimension is finished,or passed through. All of our religions have been based on a pre-Copernican idea of the cosmos where humans thought that the universe, such as the saw it, revolved around the Earth thus making Earth and us the most important creation of the Universe and 'god's' special, ultimate creation. History has unfolded from this erroneous notion upto the current day. We now know that there are uncountable numbers of galaxies which contain uncountable stars that have uncountable numbers of planets that could have developed and sustained intelligent creatures. We are not alone and we also know that much more successful species from our own Earth have become extinct either by their own 'efforts' or by events that they did not control, such as natural disasters, cosmic hits, etc. We are not special and history teaches that there has never been a mythology, however strongly believed in, that saved a species on this planet - and those mythologies were all anchored by an absolute 'god'. Every human has a 'mythology' anchored by a 'god'. The mythology may be religious or secular but something will function as an absolute anchor, a 'god'. The anchor is generally one of the many 'off-the-shelf' religions but in many cases, especially now in the North American and European worldviews, it may be 'Humanism', 'Environmentalism', 'Materialism', etc. They are all metaphysical creations of human fantasy, each engendering a group of believers who base their worldviews on it. So what drives an artist to create artwork with this understanding in this 'post-modern' worldview? Art is the only way humans have of making fantasies materially evident and emotionally compelling so that humans can accept them. There has never been a 'god' who 'spoke','wrote'.was 'heard'. was 'seen' without the agency of a writer, orator, visual artist, etc. Artwork always proceeds religion or else we humans would never know the 'god' that the epoch and society has created. Most artists are driven to create but the subject matter changes as the epoch and the power of its mythology decay. But what is always there and drives the artist, unless the artist is a commercial, decorative, or recreational artist, is the need to chase 'presence' and 'mystery'. When my artwork produces these two elements I believe that It becomes an encounter with something in the next dimension of human existing. I find that it is complete. I have reached the boundary lands of where my material existence confronts the next dimension at a specific point in my existence. The artwork has ,as my artist's statement for this website states, a historical record for me and a methodology for encounter others. My artwork has been driven by this throughout my whole existence in this dimension but only clearly understood as I grew older. The galleries in this website are representative of this personal 'pilgrimage' which I believe, is the pilgrimage that every person. consciously or not, goes through.

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