Kids of Lower Utopia - V6 No3 - Letters from the Front Lines
( A-work-in-progress)

V6 No3 Cover, ( 2002, pencil on paper, 33" x 51" )

Statement/Synopsis: "Kids of Lower Utopia - Vol.6 No3" is - drawn through the lens of Zen Non-dualism - an allegorical dream of River Scout Finnagain who travels through archetypal stages of realization (epiphanies) to finally arrive at her very Self.

In this my 8th book each page measures about 33"x 52" and are all done in .3 mechanical pencil on paper.
Nothing holds more directly the silent life of observation-in-light as a metaphor undisguised then Pencil. My drawings are a careful language of meticulous vectors sculpting all things into forms of silence. My pages are also a sequence of images, in a formal proximity, to create a narrative flow soliciting from the viewer their own intuitive leaps to bridge the space between pages -leaping through their own nonlinear space of self.

My art is a metaphor for being fully conscious it mimics self-realization by seeing so thoroughly, so seemingly instantaneously in the now, that the viewer is suspended in a direct observation free from the burden of thought, "or so I feel"

A cultural reference - Zen Non-dualism is what Joseph Campbell and Aldous Huxley called the Perennial Philosophy. It is the observation of a universal recurrence of philosophical insight independent of epoch or culture, universal truths on the nature of reality. It recognizes that all things have, and are made of (in their essence); consciousness. A consciousness that is empirically beyond mind and matter, and the direct experience (2) (3) (4) (5) of which is the same to all independent of epoch or culture. It is this experience that my images attempt to be a metaphor of in both my visual language and narrative.