I feel that "serious" contemporary art has, in accord with our increasingly secularized society, come to generally disregard the sacred and spiritual as subject matter. My artwork, rooted fundamentally in my personal spiritual practice and experiences, intentionally seeks to move beyond the intellectual and conceptual frameworks usually employed to evaluate reality and even "objects of beauty" in our hyper-cerebral 21st century culture.  

I believe it is no accident that the great artistic achievements of ancient civilizations the world over have as their subject matter and apparent inspiration the gods, religious literature and divine myths of their respective societies’ traditions. Additionally, the feeling of awe and serenity one might experience within an ancient temple or medieval cathedral is not the result of the specific dogma espoused therein; it is, instead, the natural response of the human spirit to its own creative engagement with the transcendent. I believe we still hunger for art to reflect this bridging of the sacred and mundane and, as an artist, my personal need to engage the non-intellectual realms finds its form in my sculptural work.

 

The human form is the central element in much of my art.  Again, in the 21st century, the use of such a classical object for artistic expression is considered "traditional" at best and, at worst, "qaint". However, we have forgotten that it is not simply narcissism which led so many of our classical counterparts to create works with the human form as their subject. The human body is not just "pretty" or "arousing" but is, in fact, the ultimately accessible spiritual image.  

Reflected back to us in a work of art it represents tangibly the ineffable and mysterious experience of living. It has the power to communicate to us the singular beauty of being, the powerful presence that we miss when looking in passing at ourselves or each other. Of course, all of reality, when viewed with intention contains this same seed of spiritual presence and depth. However humans identify powerfully with the human form, and our minds and hearts most easily move into the depths when "the form" as art is creatively represented as the vehicle of transcendence. Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s statement "What is to give light must endure burning" inspired my creation of The Messenger.