"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."

C.S. Lewis

sleeping beauties: early cartographic term for uncharted territories

Lullaby, 22x16x5"

"They play with visual percepts- the fleeting formations in the brain that summarize vision on the verge of consciousness...

You know it's an object, but your eyes, assaulted by fractured reflections of the room, don't agree. Your percept stutters with incessant double takes. Is this pleasant? It is if you surrender to it, accepting with fascination, the humiliating faultiness of human perception. Seeing that you don't see and knowing that you don't know, you are flooded with an awareness of reality beyond your conscious grasp. Actually, any successful art may bring about something like that."

Peter Schjeldahl about the Light and Space artists in L.A. from the late sixties

"I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what next? I get laid, I take a short holiday, but very soon after I fall upon those same thorns with gratification in pain, or suffering in joy - who knows what the mixture is! What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death but what I can get out of this perversity - only a favorable balance of disorderly emotions? No freedom? Only impulses? And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn't. I swear it."

from Herzog by Saul Bellow

"Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from."

from The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

"I look back now and think, How lucky

not to know what you are doing."

William Kentridge about his early films

from an interview with Calvin Tomkins

in the 1/18/10 The New Yorker

keeping the faith, 22x16"

"The long-planned-for rituals of departure were forgotten in the confusion, but strangely, this great outburst of activity became itself a kind of worship, not so much intended to achieve an end... but rather as an expression of awe, of the kind that might great a divine revelation: for when a moment arrives that is so much feared and so much long awaited, it perforates the veil of everyday expectation in such a way as to reveal the prodigious darkness of the unknown."

from Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

"The essence of Warhol's genius was to eliminate the one aspect of a thing without which that thing would, to conventional ways of thinking, cease to be itself, and then to see what happened."

Louis Menand about Andy Warhol in the Jan, 11, 2010 New Yorker

“We might think of the culture as possessing a ‘symptom repertoire’ — a range of physical symptoms available to the unconscious mind for the physical expression of psychological conflict.”

from Paralysis: The Rise and Fall of a ‘Hysterical’ Symptom by Edward Shorter

"Art begins when a (hu)man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs."

Leo Tolstoy

Fallen, 20x16"

now in the collection of

Barbara & Jimmy Walton, Georgia

"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there."

Henry Miller