This is one of the new paintings I recently finished. It shows a person (me) laying in the foreground holding a thread that winds its way through the hills of San Francisco. The thread represents where I have physically been, the time and experience of walking through the city condensed into a material object.
When we visit or live in a city, the more we explore it the more we collect memories and associations with that bit of geography, the wider our definition of a place becomes. We also see places without physically standing on them (the water in the bay, the sky, the air around us) that we have sensational memories of (sight, smell, temperature).
I am currently reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero of a Thousand Faces, and he talks of a world navel. I represent the world navel with the dark somewhat ominous spiral expanding in the center of the city, a nexus between this plane of existence and a dimension beyond our senses. A connection with the experience of exploration and learning that lies between memory of tangible, physical surroundings and a deeper understanding that lies beyond what we can explain in words, beyond what our senses can comprehend, something that can only be suggested through symbols, presented so each individual can meditate individually through their own framework of the reality that exists beyond our comprehension.
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