I have seen by traveling to different countries that the light seems to have a different hue, a nature all its own in relationship to the geographical elements, the plants, the stones, the dirt and animals (I include people under the animal description). Light seems to have its own unique characteristics based on the angle its hitting the earth, the longitude and latitude you’re standing on at the moment. This is the light vibrating and dancing through the ancient and modern streets of Istanbul, broken up into cross sections of time, a split second of sensation and time tiled like slides for a microscope.
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This piece titled Jasmine Tea With Okapi is a fun story showing an Okapi wondering into a tea house at night, and a geisha serving him some Jasmine tea. The okapi seems smitten with the geisha serving him, though the geisha seem a bit unsure. He has probably been to this tea house before, most likely has a crush on this particular geisha. She knows this and seems a little uneasy that we have wondered in and are viewing the unorthodox relationship between the two.
Yellow butterflies are flying in through the window and partaking in the spilt tea on the table and gathering nectar from the wild cherry blossoms in the geisha's hair. This idea of the yellow butterflies is influenced from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book 100 Years of Solitude.
The hanging lamp forms an eye, drowsily staring back at the viewer. The situation created by this scenario, combined with the blue-night milieu, nature with her wild cherry blossoms, yellow butterflies and anthropomorphic okapi, gives birth to a conscious; a situational conscious whose eye flows through the hanging lamp and stares back at the viewer with an ancient ambivalence.
The reason I chose an okapi for this piece is to contrast the natural markings of the okapi with the unnatural ornamentations of the geisha (and other women who find it necessary to over decorate themselves).
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.
