If you believe there's nothing out there to see

I was almost 3 years old when Neil Armstrong took his small step/giant leap.  I have vague memories of the early space program; flickering images from the tube television, a trip to the National Air and Space Museum as a boy, later a shuttle launch as a teenager.  Like a lot boys, I loved rockets and jet planes and Star Trek and space...I have always loved space.

To have set foot on another planetary body, what must that be like?  How can the rest of your life compare?  Did he, at that moment, understand Moses, Muhammad, Elijah, Buddha?  Removed from the empirical reality and thrust into the fantastic, a shaman's journey which simply doesn't translate to those who can only trust the ground beneath their feet; what do you do after that?

There are those born with the exploring spirit.  I don't think it's in everyone's DNA, not at all.  The searching spirit becomes many things, but the static, comfortable, accepting, unquestioning life is simply not an option for these souls.  There's no point to that existence.  One man's small step changed the course of our culture, and gave courage to all the astronauts and ceiling-smashers and rule-breakers since; myself included.

When I started painting, really committing myself to painting, words like spiritual and the Sublime would get you tossed out of dinner parties unless you were disparaging them.  But when I look at the painting of JMW Turner, or Rothko, I immediately get that sensation I that get from looking through a telescope, or seeing images from the space station, or from Mars, or staring out into the ocean; that we, you and I, are insignificant and tiny and our lives and so-called problems are little more than space dust to the infinite.

All I want to do is create portals to that place.  That peaceful insignificance.  There's no room for hate, or ego or agenda there.  We can only be carried away.  I think in that moment, that absolute surrender, we find the greatest part of ourselves; the part that -in fact- doesn't even belong to us, but is a part of everyone and everything.  It's what makes us human.  It isn't a chemical compound, or a genetic puzzle piece, or anything that can be quantified or analyzed or reduced or argued about.  Our essence is our shared experience; our loss of Selves in which we find ourselves.  That's why I paint.  That is what art has the power to show us.