I am exploring the levels of human spiritual consciousness.  The view through the window, through the cave of machpala into paradise or a Platonic ideal, the complex task of communicating that ideal and the icon, the holy object, the expression of faith or ceremony, of communion with the higher self or god consciousness, and the immutable language that has followed humanity since our earliest imaginings.   With spiritual understanding as a goal, we have the natural unfolding of the simple joy of living a life unconditioned and undistracted.

The approach ideally is from the top down.  In this realm, concepts of the profane are transformed into their higher meanings, offensive gestures become kuji-in or divine mudras.  

First there is the portal, the window, the doorway.  This brings us to the limits of modern imagined human experience and offers a border between worlds.  The interfaces, the margins, these windows are ephemeral like all existence on the edges.  Standing on the shore facing the ocean, there is a collision, fission, fusion of elements, states and realities. The portal cannot exist long, pushing out from one side; it becomes bombarded & weathered on the other side.  Many belief systems put the entrance to secret worlds in the extreme and remote areas of our world, the entrance to Shambhala in the Himalayas, Avalon through the mists, and Mt. Olympus above the clouds. 

Metamorphosis is a part of life; we are always passing through the results of our own changes in perception.  We get only brief glances of other dimensions, and we are like astronauts in space helmets stepping out into space.  Buddhists, animists, and many First Nations percieve vessels and other objects as consisting of one or more other-dimensional creatures resembling birds or four-leggeds or creatures of the sea.  This other-dimensional being is recognized, and also honored in Tsimshian art, carved and painted into and onto the surface of the implements and objects required for life in this world.  In the most basic form by the sheer act of creation, we are all using this spirit language whether we know it or not.

Every artist has their vision and their own language.  In modern society the artist takes on the role of seer, mystic, shaman, healer, philosopher, sociologist, and scientist.  Today art has transcended the material reference, the dream reference, the isolate and the congregate, post-modernism and mass-consciousness.  This new space exists as a netherworld as yet undefined and potentially indefinable.  It references older traditions, makes connections between older paradigms or actually transcends momentarily and with long jumps, grasping the ethereal, tunneling a portal into a new dimension of mind.  Art is a ladder of text.  Each painting is simultaneously an alchemical formula and vehicle.