Concept Statement

This is what I told a gallery I’m doing, and I guess I’m going to stick with it.  Never worked this way before.  Always just a general idea, the body of work defined the statement…this might be good for me.  Parameters/limits are good for creativity, I believe.

In the words of Richard Diebenkorn:  My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.

Concept Statement:

Making A World is a body of work which explores a single poem by Rainer Maria Rilke titled Entering.  The poem extends an invitation and challenge to stand on a threshold and approach the mystery of life.  Desiring to express this encounter between self and nature, I’ll take the poem’s imagery, metaphor and symbolism inside with memories of my own relationship with the natural world.  The result of this challenge being a transformed poetic space that offers the viewer both the sensory and subjective allure of abstract painting along with the emotional draw of landscape painting. Whoever you may be: step into the evening. Step out of the room where everything is known. Whoever you are, your house is the last before the far-off. With your eyes, which are almost too tired to free themselves from the familiar, you slowly take one black tree and set it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made a world. It is big and like a word, still ripening in silence. And though your mind would fabricate its meaning, your eyes tenderly let go of what they see.

Rainer Maria Rilke Book of Images