Yesterday, I had one of those Zeusesque TMJ migraines from which I had to birth an Athenian idea.

So I made a slideshow of my paintings and used YouTube's AudioSwap to set the music to "C'est Beau La Vie" with Catherine Deneuve and Benjamin Biolay.  I hope you enjoy it.

This is one of those paintings that just keeps changing.  I keep going to it and adding more and layers of light and color.

I came across this "Water Color Dragon" while I was looking through a drawer a few minutes ago.  I painted this two years ago?  I just remember having some construction paper and one of those water color kits you give kids.  And I was looking for something to do.

I finally completed the Lion Heart painting I started for my mom.

Acrylic.

Work in Progress
Summer 2011
Oil

I started working on this about two weeks ago.  It started out as a rather dark emotion, but I've pushed it further.

I painted "Rapture in Blue" at the end of 2010.  I was feeling rather good about myself having learned a great deal in my tv/film classes.  I was also feeling rather strongly spiritual and connected to God.  I wasn't really "thinking" when I painted it.  I was "feeling".

"I Am Ninja" was an exercise in simplicity.  Sky, earth, action.  I was in very good spirits when I painted that blood sky with hints of sunset.  The addition of the ninja rushing over the land was inspired and I made the weapon questionably a gun in one hand or a blade in the other.  A ninja plays tricks on the eyes.

About a month after I painted "The Blue Hand of Creation" I was surfing the Internet reading Mayan Astrology.   I found a site http://www.astrodreamadvisor.com/free_mayan_readings.html that described my conscious self as follows:

"Blue Hand is a gateway, an opening, a portal from one understanding to another. A clue to the meaning of Blue Hand is found in the meditation, "I am, by thinly veiled design, the threshold to other dimensions. In my ending is my beginning. The initatory gateway awaits." 

I remember sitting there reading this thinking to myself, "Where have I seen this blue hand?"  And then I walked into the living room and looked on the wall.  Needless to say, I was shocked that I had somehow painted what the Mayans considered to be my conscious self.

Nonetheless, I understood that my place in this world was to express that creativity from within.  That to suppress it was to kill myself slowly.  I understood that my mind is a vortex of worlds from which I can express art and wisdom and tell stories and that I just have to reach out my hand to grasp this creative power.

In 2005, I was going through some extraordinarily difficult times in Connecticut.  I will not delve into the complexity of those issues, but suffice it to say, I was filled with a deep abiding rage and sadness following the dissolution of a great romance and doing everything I could to buffer myself against those feelings.

Art was part of how I coped with that world.  I worked on graphic designs and paintings and writing almost everyday.  I am ashamed to say that I lost almost two years of graphic art and writing in a cataclysmic computer virus accident that destroyed my computer shortly after Christmas 2004.  Needless to say, I was quite distraught after that accident

"Cloak of Serenity" was a self-portrait representing my coping mechanism.  Everyday I would get up and meditate myself into a state of appearing calm and serene.  I believed that if I could not allow the pain to touch me that I would get over it, that time would allow me to heal all wounds.  I believed the world was full of people that wanted nothing but to cause other people misery and I refused to be their victim.  No matter what anyone did, I would stand tall and allow it to wash over me without a flicker of emotion.

I would wear serenity like a cloak though a dagger stabbed me in the heart with every step and my soul bled on the inside.