"WELCOME TO MY MIND"

38" x 30", Graphite on paper

The pressure of the imagination on the artists shoulders. This is my baby that was created over the period over 2008-2010. Begun in Australia and finished in Canada, this piece has travelled the world with me. The design came about from my days working in a full time job that was not me. The pressure of my ideas in my head became too much. I would run home every day and design this, I would sit quietly on my lunch breaks sketching up ideas. It was an incredible process that I feel shaped my future. This is very close to where I want to be as an artist. Surreal, intricate and forever intriguing. I hope you like this one. If it had never sold, I would have been a happy man. But it has found a very beautiful home which I am grateful for. Thank you Jackie. (:

Amazing things happen some times. 

I was in Stanley Park showing my art one day when a woman named Kristina walks up, has a nice chat then sees this piece. She was really taken by it, which in my mind as an artist is the greatest honour. Kristina asked if she could write a poem about it for me. 

Here it is......

Welcome to My Mind

Shadow submits

As light grabs it round the throat

And thrusts a hand between its thighs.

What follows is a strobing coitus

And a climax far more textured than grey;

An affair that is not about healing

For what squirms and breaks

Can never scab.

It is about the throb of grief

And its scrambled voice;

The mass of life

Awkwardly shifting its weight

From pain to relief

And back again;

About something forced to sit still and upright

That is more comfortable

Balanced on its haunches.

These affairs are the ferocious restlessness

Of a mind, who,

Like the ocean,

Understands nothing

Of its own strength

Nor the physics of swell

But only knows how,

Instinctively sensing the fatality

Of stillness.

Dripping and spent,

The light recedes

And shadow swells with their love-children,

Those delicate rejects, limping misfits:

Eve's headless, mermaid doppelganger;

An hourglass whose salt has dissolved

In water

So a small ocean pulses

Through the glass tapered belly

Keeping the time of oceans and moon;

A thousand-tentacled beast - 

The mutant offspring of prehistory

Interbreeding with the future.

These and others coexist

In this stewing underworld

Above my shoulders

Where usurped gods wander forlornly

Treading oily roads

That writhe beneath their soles,

Following corridors

That spread like fingers:

The paradox is not lost on them

As they find themselves

In someone else's palm.

I come across them

Amidst one of my cerebral forests

Of key-shaped trees

Draped in nerve-ending vines

And attempt a greeting:

"Welcome to my mind."

But they stand agape,

Marveling at the volume

Of the ashen inhabitants fostered here

Who are so weightless and necessary

They are often forgotten

Like the darkness between stars.