The Alchemy of the Unconscious: An Argument for Transcendence
There comes a point in every creative life when the work stops being something one makes and becomes something one receives. My own perspective has shifted, slowly and irrevocably, from curation to genesis — from arranging what already exists toward midwifing what does not yet exist. This website, then, is not a gallery but a living map: a record of a journey whose vitality lies not in the Realms already charted, but at the bow of the ship, cutting forward into the path least traveled. The wake behind is merely evidence; the prow is where transcendence happens.
I have come to believe that creation is a form of profound gratitude — perhaps the highest form available to us. When we make something new, we are not producing “content.” We are performing liturgy. We are mirroring the cosmic process that fostered our own being, confronting the void as it was once confronted on our behalf, and populating it with structure, emotion, and vision. To create is to whisper thank you back to whatever first whispered us into existence. This is the liturgical pivot at the heart of my practice: the work moves away from the ego’s plea of “look at what I made” and toward the humbler reverence of “look at the process I am honoring.”
My books represent a human attempt to interpret existence. Yet I suspect the truth lies not within any of them, but in the tension between them, or in a direction departing from the human frame altogether. When I look toward the horizon, I see un-tilled soil: a Shadow of the Unobserved, dedicated to the pre-creation state. The blank canvas before the first mark. The silence before the first note. The vacuum before the Big Bang. The razor-thin instant in which nothing becomes something. This is where transcendence resides — not in the finished work, but in that fragile, luminous threshold where the creator’s hand first touches the void.
What happens, I wonder, when the mathematics of the universe meets the mystery of the afterlife? Is there an Infinite Variable — a place where the rigid laws of physics and the fluid nature of the soul finally merge? I contend the creative journey is precisely the act of complementing the cosmic process at this seam. To force the light is to project only what we already know; but to wait — to witness — is to allow the unconscious to act as a prism, taking the white light of the void and refracting it into colors no one has yet seen. In this waiting, the artist becomes both participant and observer, discovering the work at the exact moment it is born.
This is what I have come to call, for want of a better term, The Alchemy of the Unconscious. In this state, the self is no longer the sole architect of the work but a collaborator with something larger — a vessel through which energy flows, a stranger watching a landscape reveal its own light. It is a posture of profound humility, and it is, I would argue, the only posture from which genuine transcendence can emerge. The product matters less than the spark; the painting matters less than the process the painting honors. The bridge built between the viewer and the void is the real artifact.
I did not arrive at this philosophy easily. My formative years were spent in continual writing and sketching and drawing, and I was offered an art scholarship upon graduating high school — only to enter the military during Vietnam, after which the demands of family pulled me into fields where artistic personalities are rarely welcomed. I found partial expression in interior design, factory design, point-of-purchase displays, trade show exhibits, illustration, even cartooning — but my passion for artistic freedom was continually denied. The frustration of seeing ideas ridiculed for being inconsistent with the status quo eventually drove me into the study of psychology, where I earned a doctorate in cognitive dissonance and immersed myself in Gestalt theory. What began as an escape became a key: I learned that the mind locks onto an image and resists efforts to change it, and that this very tendency is the enemy of creative transcendence. My painting style is now a race — capturing inspiration before habituation calcifies it, painting over earlier works to escape the gravitational pull of cognitive consistency.
This is also why I favor abstracts over landscapes and portraits. Duplication of objects is tedious; it asks the painting only to be what already is. Abstracts, by contrast, continually evoke novel images from each viewer’s unique experience — they are not endpoints but invitations. They embody the very transcendence I am arguing for: a frequency that does not exist until the moment it is observed, completed not by the artist’s hand alone but by the encounter between work and witness.
The artistic life inherent to writing and painting, I will not pretend otherwise, is a crucible. Armchair critics are everywhere, rejection is constant, financial uncertainty breeds self-doubt, and there is a particular revulsion in creating for reward at the expense of freedom — commissions burden me far more than personal expression ever has. Expectations are the enemy of emergence. Yet it is precisely this difficulty that purifies the work. Perseverance and persistence are not optional virtues for the artist; they are the very means by which the soul is forged into a fit instrument for transcendence.
When I invite you to look at my horizon, I am not asking you to admire what is finished. I am asking you to peer with me into the un-tilled soil — the landscapes still waiting for their first light, the frequencies utterly our own, waiting to be explored and brought to life. My website is best understood not as a portfolio but as a laboratory for the Infinite Variable, shifting in the dark, waiting for the next spark of intuition to emanate its first glimmer. Transcendence, in the end, is not a destination one reaches. It is the ongoing act of standing at the edge of the void in gratitude, refusing to fill it with what we already know, and allowing something truly other to arrive. That arrival — humble, unbidden, and luminous — is the only work worth making, and the only thank you worth offering.