10 Year Anniversary: The Painting Diary 24 of 30
Painting Diary 24 of 30: Awake 2017
Merry Christmas, if that’s your thing. This might be about the most Christmasy thing I have to share with you, and actually it’s origin passes through Christianity for a brief moment. It goes like this:
A few years before, I had a vision in a ceremony about the merger of two forms of consciousness, it could be any two things but in this case it was specifically plant and human consciousness that had come together to form an evolved higher functioning entity. While both parties had evolved, they remained independent but had established a relationship that was mutually beneficial. The horizontal beam is human consciousness, the vertical pole, or sword, represents plant consciousness. In the original vision, there that night, sitting in the dark, a head full of ayahuasca, the scene displayed before me was an epic psychedelic cross, rendered in monochromatic silver, with a blue grid running through everything. I had the thought that the cross as a symbol was far older than Christianity and did in fact represent the meeting of two things, resulting in an evolution of some kind. In that moment the cross became a symbol of strength, and had nothing to do with Christian symbolism.
Soon after I got home I made a pencil drawing of this idea on graph paper (seen below) and I always intended to make it into a painting but by the time I got around to painting this more than a year later I was over the drawing and wanted more from the painted version. So I redesigned it completely. The cross symbolism felt too overpowering and I knew it would be misunderstood so I sawed the arms off it. They’re still there, energetically at least, but the eye doesn’t get fixated on the symbol, I hope.
This painting is a cornucopia of life and death. I wanted to throw in everything that I was interested in, all in one painting. Life and death, foliage, blackberry, dandelion, hornets, the mysterious spirit of nature, the exploding renewal of spring, Mt Rainier (sort of) and so on.
Dead center, at the hilt of the ‘earth sword’ is the open eye, representing the awakening of a new consciousness. It took me more than a year to finish. After about 6 months of work I put it away and almost abandon it but after returning from Peru with my head literally on fire, this was the first thing I pulled out to work on. After another month of steady work I finally signed it and moved on. It was worth that extra push, so glad I found what I needed to finish it.
Awake, Oil on board, 2017
Technology of Plants, pencil of graph paper, 2015