Visual Meditation
I’m not a yogi, nor am I an especially deep practitioner of meditation. My mother taught me about meditation many years ago and I found it useful to quiet a busy mind and ease anxiety. But as life became busy with a demanding job, fatherhood, and the desire to keep making art, I found little time for activities such as meditation. Since all creative acts are the result of combining previous knowledge, I gave myself the task to find a way to incorporate meditation into my art practice. The results are the images in this exhibition.
Most of my artistic output involves repeating one simple mark after another – lines, dots, or shapes. These countless small repetitive acts serve as a type of meditation. I attempt to focus solely on each individual mark or cut as it’s being made. Even the prints of cross-sections of trees–Two Hearted and Large Oak–involve hours of sanding, as end grain is notoriously difficult to work with. One might be tempted to view the process as drudgery as the mind floats from thought to thought. I attempt to take what I learned from making repetitive marks and focus my mind on the act of sanding with the noise of the sander as a type of chant. As my hand keeps moving while I draw, cut, or sand, my mind becomes still and open to new meanings and new directions. The focused attention on small seemingly insignificant acts is in itself a metaphor for how I want to conduct myself in all parts of my life. Do the intentions of the artist affect the meaning of the resulting art? I like to think the answer is yes.
I’m also attempting to capture something about the rural landscape in which I live, the shores of Lake Superior and in the surrounding woods. The images come from experiences with and thoughts of water, trees, and air. Rather than present a factual reality, an abstract illusion is fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination like a poem. The natural elements have been deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted.
I’m not a yogi, nor am I an especially deep practitioner of meditation. My mother taught me about meditation many years ago and I found it useful to quiet a busy mind and ease anxiety. But as life became busy with a demanding job, fatherhood, and the desire to keep making art, I found little time for activities such as meditation. Since all creative acts are the result of combining previous knowledge, I gave myself the task to find a way to incorporate meditation into my art practice. The results are the images in this exhibition.
Most of my artistic output involves repeating one simple mark after another – lines, dots, or shapes. These countless small repetitive acts serve as a type of meditation. I attempt to focus solely on each individual mark or cut as it’s being made. Even the prints of cross-sections of trees–Two Hearted and Large Oak–involve hours of sanding, as end grain is notoriously difficult to work with. One might be tempted to view the process as drudgery as the mind floats from thought to thought. I attempt to take what I learned from making repetitive marks and focus my mind on the act of sanding with the noise of the sander as a type of chant. As my hand keeps moving while I draw, cut, or sand, my mind becomes still and open to new meanings and new directions. The focused attention on small seemingly insignificant acts is in itself a metaphor for how I want to conduct myself in all parts of my life. Do the intentions of the artist affect the meaning of the resulting art? I like to think the answer is yes.
I’m also attempting to capture something about the rural landscape in which I live, the shores of Lake Superior and in the surrounding woods. The images come from experiences with and thoughts of water, trees, and air. Rather than present a factual reality, an abstract illusion is fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination like a poem. The natural elements have been deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted.
