Out Beyond Ideas

Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense. Rumi

Work in progress, May 2017 pictured here (on the left) in my studio is the first of four canvases in a new series, the title of which is too early to know. What I do know is that Rumi’s words in Out Beyond Ideas speak to me in profound ways, perhaps even more so given the current political landscape.

While love and longing continue to be themes within my landscape work—feeling states I somehow recreate in paint on canvas that unconsciously rely in large part on memory and intuition—there is much about making and experiencing paintings that cannot be said. Words simply fall short, or worse get it wrong. The earth, air, light and life that surround the studio that surround me, grant endless possibilities for me to make sense of things, and I am ever grateful.

With little correspondence to literal patches of land, the images I make take shape in fields beyond knowing. They may begin with marks made about branch and brush, but their sensibility betrays colour and sound that emerge in the course of painting—in the dance between seeing and marking, marking and seeing—in paint on, paint off. Between ability and inability, knowledge and ignorance, somewhere out beyond ideas, beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing. I invite you to meet me there.