Back Story

So. At the very beginning of this work, as mentioned in Waving Hello, I was inspired by the digital, self-professed “sacred” artist Adi Da Samraj… and his call to partake in the sacramental feast of.... “TRANSCENDENTAL REALISM”.

“Transcendental Realism… is purposed to show the true nature of reality, instead of what reality appears to be.”

This seminal idea, or seed question: What is the true nature of reality? Has always been at the root of my own artistic endeavors and explorations.

But. Before jumping into these latest artistic forays, these epic, exploratory journeys into querulous cyberspace… Let us back up a few decades in “ye olde” time-space. And fill in some of the background information of this… highly confessional… personalized verbal canvas

In the beginning… of my life as a young, aspiring artist. On the first official day of… my first authentic class in… studio art at the University of Virginia. In the year 1976. My junior year in college. I went to the junk yard. I went to the local junk yard on the muddy outskirts of the sleepy college town, Charlottesville, Virginia. And, I collected junk. While other students might have come prepared with “high-rag-content” twenty-four-inch sketchbooks and rainbow-colored wooden drawing pencils. Thrilled by the prospect of composing directly from raw nature, a salacious nude model or their febrile young imaginations. I was never so inclined

I was born a simple hunter-gatherer. I was a born an enthusiastic, unrelenting treasure seeker. So. It is in my nature, my core genetic programming then, to look… to search around my physical environment… for interesting stuff. And so. Upon that fatefuI first day in James Hagan’s Beginning Sculpture class. I headed straight to the junk yard, where I hunted for curious cast-off objects. Gathered rusty metal machine fragments. Broken bits and pieces of discarded rubbish… mostly metal, some wood, some glass

You see. This is important. This is important to understand the “ hidden meaning of me” and “the true nature of reality”… on so many levels… I don’t know where to begin!

The junk yard… with its willy-nilly piles of… fragmented, rusted, discarded machine parts… seemed to hold, for me, as a young man growing up in the seventies… the vast mechanical, heart-ambitions of modern civilization. The heaps of old twisted relics… dented, yet shiny, bulbous chrome bumpers on window-shattered cars… seemed to eloquently speak to me… to sing the miles and squeal the trials… of lesser and greater roads travelled

The soggy, filthy-rotten mattresses and broken coil springs?!

Tales from those unsung… “quiet lives of desperation”… perhaps, or…? The hidden dreams and inarticulate woes… of the Collective Human Unconscious?

Alright. Alright, Jung. Junk yards are not for everyone. But. There is something so

Undeniably real, but never quite final about a junkyard
Like a charnel ground, a graveyard, an ancient kitchen midden
A wasteland of ruin on the edge of a modern city

An empty, overgrown lot at the end of a road leading nowhere
There is something so intriguing in its unkempt truth
Something so appealing in its unscripted beauty
Something frightening, depressing… grotesque?
Perhaps on rare occasion.
While at the same time, so potentially enlivening
To the artist’s imagination
Liberating to the indwelling spirit

A junk yard, you see
Is a land of infinite perturbations
A dadaist happening!
Filled with surrealist chance encounters
An unfinished modernist sculpture park
An open air market of readymades
An “island of misfit toys”
An unredeemed world of losses
An aborted colossus awaiting resurrection!!

A bargain-basement place to acquire cheap-and-easy, cast-off “religious relics” for an aspiring modern remake of Michelangelo…?

Ah. You may laugh, sir. But. The Pieta and The Sistine Chapel were certainly models of inspiration for my youthful heart. For my first heart-felt, honest attempts at art making. And the fact is

I have always aspired to make Temple Art!
I have always aspired to raise the Temple of Art
Once again
From the ashes and trash heaps of middling modernity
To make art that speaks to the highest and best in us
To make art that is worthy of the title
Sacred
Art that is ecstatic, transcendent
Of sublime and great worth
Art that realizes all that we mean by the badly abused
And poorly understood word
GOD
Art that praises The Divine Nature of Reality Itself
Art that Reveals the Underlying Unity
And Profound Essence of All
That We Are

Well. Maybe that’s not how I would have phrased it back then. As a young man. In 1976. But. Certainly I was intent upon raising up some sort of soulful, aesthetic entity from the “dungheap of history”. From the shattered, indecipherable remains of my own life to that point. And, the elegant junkyard became my nursery of noble ideas. My open-air palace of misbegotten muses. My “stepping-off”… or rather, stepping-into place

So. In 2008. At the ripe age of 53. I… miraculously… began the uncertain process again. The deeply mysterious process of “making art”. Or, as I have mentioned. The befuddling process

of determining… the true nature of reality, instead of what reality appears to be. Only this time, I began my careful study of reality along the slimy banks, around the turgid mouth and in the general environs of the Mad River, in Humboldt County

Humboldt County, a half-wild, self-conflicted place
A mystical place of dense fog and brilliant rainbow light
A snake-eating-its-own-tale kind of spiritous place
A controversial county famous for the last, vanishing
Ancient “old-growth” redwood giants
A country of Hupa, Karuk, Mattole, Wiyot and Yurok
A Native American land of
Eel River Athapaskan peoples
Who still abide…
And of course,
A place made infamous of late for
The grandscale, illicit-if-not-illegal cultivation of marijuana

A place of weed then, and a garden of yogi weeds
A place where the Green Goddess some call
THE MOTHER
Grows and flourishes!
With greenhouse encouragement and full-sun abandon
The Garden of Paradise then, for lowly pot growers
Lord Shiva’s outlaw gang
Keepers of the Flaming Lotus
Guardians of the Promised Land
Tenders of the Tree of Knowledge
Devotees of Kali Gangamama

Alias Green Tara,
The Radiant PLANT Princess of All That Flowers, Grows,
Fruits and Nourishes

A sacred place then, where Mother Nature Herself
The Grand Old Dame
Holds court and sways her mad, wide hips
Swell bent north
Wiggling squiggling jiggling
Swirling twirling curling
Going up and coming down
Left-right sideways
Expanding her broad flanks outward
Contracting her mad furious mouth
With her majestic Batwot-style
With her illustrious, gleaming determination
To enter the depths of the sea

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