In the winter of 2008, I started to write my way in to certain paintings. My intention was not to make work that would be literally readable, but to infuse those paintings with layers of felt meaning. I ultimately wanted to tease out a visual language that was both evocative and imbued with a sense of a subtly perceptible underlying voice that spoke directly to the core of the viewer.

The early paintings in this exploration began with a personal and emotive approach to writing, stream of consciousness, journaling style. I was trying to get my feelings out and onto the canvas. I was tormented most of the time during this period. I believed at the time that given a certain universal quality to human experience, the feeling impression of the finished paintings would in turn touch viewers’ hearts. I hoped that they would strike a cord much like moving pieces of music could in audiences. The songwriter longs to express or perhaps expunge some persistent agony and their creation in turn provides a place for the listener to feel and transmute their experiences. It is alchemical.

Over time though, continuing to work with writing as a way in to painting, I gradually became less interested in touching this interpersonal and subjective aspect of the human bond and felt more drawn to the transcendent piece, the more timeless and constant one that is at work beneath the fleeting and often tumultuous realm of human experience.

I wanted to make work that was deliberately infused with specific intentions and vibrations— work that sought to share a particular state of consciousness or type of awareness, while at the same time being visually appealing and symbolically complex enough to engage and hold space for a contemporary viewer.

At around that same time, I began regularly practicing Japa Meditation, repetition of mantra. I found mantras in books, received them from preceptors, heard them on records. I worked with many and over time certain ones really stuck, really did something for me. These mantras, often thousands of years old, seemed to exist in a realm outside of cultural or conventionally religious contexts. While their repetition formally resembles prayer and can be considered such, millions of practitioners around the world believe that their power is nonetheless innate and imbedded in their syllables. In saying them one calls to the Divine, but the resulting response is often experienced as emerging from within. It defies explanation or description. Saying mantras out loud, singing them, repeating them mentally, even writing them, all of these forms of Japa, begin to transmit the frequency, the vibration of the mantra. In that vibration, states of awareness are transmitted and recognized in our beings, in our DNA, I suppose. I have no scientific proof of this assertion, but I have experienced it. So for the last ten or so years I have been making paintings that are built usually on a foundation of one specific mantra, and in some cases, a few. In many but not all cases I have given the painting a title that refers to the mantra.

While the visual vocabulary in these paintings no doubt reflects my own cultural heritage— all the art I have seen, studied or otherwise been influenced by— it was never an attempt to visually illustrate or depict the mantra. I do believe however that the mantras’ vibrations shape the paintings’ finished surfaces and are intrinsic to their sense of meaning, to the stories they seem to tell.

I hope you enjoy them.