When I was a kid reading was very, very difficult. Guess it’s just the way my brain is wired. But since math was so easy, my engineer father refused to give up on me. In compensation, my family read to me constantly … guess they figured that a life without “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Huckleberry Finn” was no kind of life at all. So you can imagine everyone’s complete amazement when, at thirteen, I went out entirely on my own and bought a book. Even more shocking, it was a book without any pictures at all.
Here’s the story. After one of my weekly music lessons, at Cotswold Mall in Charlotte, I was wandering around … killing time until Mother collected me. There was a used book sale — table after table of books, stacked spine up, probably four for a dollar or something like that. I remember the way the tables were arranged it was an easy jump in my mind’s eye to see boxcars lined up in a vast railroad switching yard. Open-top boxcars full of books. And for some inexplicable reason, I felt compelled to get closer and look at the titles. Oddly, there was one, lost in this sea, that drew me to it … a book called “Sermon on the Mount” by Emmet Fox.
I sat on a bench in the mall and started reading. It was easier than usual. With every paragraph and every page, I remember thinking one thing: ‘I know this already’ … but what I didn’t know at that time was that there were other people out there like me. So I’ve never thought of this pivotal moment in my life as a conversion … whatever that means. It was much more like a homecoming … discovering that there are other people who see the world as I do. Prior to that I’d always thought, ‘I am different’ and I was ok with that. Then suddenly, what a cozy shift over to ‘we are different’. It would be years before I would meet any of these other people like me … and years after that before I would come to live from the place where art and science and religion converge.
While organizing the new studio yesterday, I found this picture … a cruxifixction study painted ages ago, mostly as an exercise in using thick glazes to convey an otherworldly feeling … in this case, the feeling of Christ energy. For me that is the energy of creation itself … of mind expressing itself in matter. The intentional conversion of mind to matter is divine … it is doing God’s work.
I remember doing several of these, and for some reason this one has survived. It’s tempting, even with a backlog of work, to take up this idea again. Hmmmm …. but this time the energy shape will be more advanced. Instead of a circular vortex with a triangular base connecting to earth, I would paint the shape of two triangles, the bottom base joining with an inverted triangular top, like the shape of an ‘X” … and the circular energy vortex pulsing out from point of convergence.
