"I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, because you've given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I've spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind's eye. It's been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I've been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers. But I wish I were a poet.
Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, 'Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open.'
I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we'll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What's real? What isn't real? Maybe those aren't the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on?
I wish I had made things for life to depend on."
Jonathan Safran Foer

"Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down."

Ray Bradbury

"I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short, morphe in Greek means the the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can’t start writing something down until I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn’t say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is."

Anne Carson

meadow

24x16"

unfurling

22x16"

now in the collection of Sandi Gerstung

"To get born, your body makes a pact with death, and from that moment

all it tries to do is cheat"

from Louise Gluck's "A Slip of Paper"

"When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them."

Mark Rothko

exuberant nostalgia

22x16"

across the park

22x16"

collection of Sunny & Chris, Cleveland OH

"Societies in decline have no use for visionaries."

Anais Nin

rocky shore jewels

22x16"

"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."

David Foster Wallace

bay oases

22X16"

flora eterna, 2402 calvert street

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

from Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

night alley river

22x16"

now in the collection of Teresa Indjein

"Do one thing everyday that scares you."

Eleanor Roosevelt

snowy park lanterns

22x16"

"And I, infinitesimal being,

drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind."

Pablo Neruda

winter cosmos tree

22x16"

collection of Summer & Matt Gonter

"Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones."

David Brooks, NYT 3/29/2010

“These new collectors never knew the Sculls,” Ms. Goldman said. “They tell the story of a couple who simply collected with their gut.”

from New York Times article about an exhibit of the Scull's collection at the Acquavella Gallery in NY