The Elements
Portraits of Fire, Water, Earth and Air
As we run and hurry through our every day, life can get to be a flat go here, do this, get this done sort of world. Now, stop for a minute, and think about it all again.
Think of not only your life but the lives of everyone you know, your family, your friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Perhaps think of what they may do during the course of a day. Then begin to think of how many people you know and imagine each of them living their own lives, worrying their own individual worries and experiencing their own unique joys. Now think of it all happening all at the same time, right now. Then just try to expand this out to our entire country, our continent, the rest of the world, all the people in it, living their own lives, doing whatever they are doing, right now. Stay with me here. Now expand that out even further and think of the animals, the plants, the wind, the sunshine, where it could be raining, where it could be night. It’s somewhat mind-boggling, isn’t it? It goes even further than that because we live on a planet that is orbiting a sun that is part of a solar planetary system, which is part of a galaxy, that is one of countless in an ever-expanding theoretically infinite universe. It’s not really such a flat do-this-do-that world is it? Every moment is so filled with so much life, death, vibrance, decay and anything and everything in between. This is one of my favorite ways to get myself out of a rut - expand forever outward and grow myself to be the limitless cosmos and then shrink myself smaller than the tiniest particle. It definitely helps give perspective on whatever I am dealing with.
Element Fire
We exist in a vast hologram, where unique parts, like you and me, like our cells in our body, like the galaxies in space, function and exist on our own, but are part of a vast whole, a unified totality, a grand picture where we have no idea what the image looks like. Individually, we ourselves are a vast hologram, with tissue, organs, bones, and subtle energies making up our own unified whole. As the Emerald Tablet so famously states, as above, so below. There is the microcosm to the great macrocosm, the small and the big in a connected intertwining system. One of the building blocks of all of this <waves hands around in large circles> are the elements, which are both the subtle energies acting as cosmic essences, to the material manifestations that we are so familiar with all around us.
Element Water
The elements are not just what we think of as earth, fire, water and air, but they are also metaphors for energies felt in our physical, mental and spiritual dimensions, not as different phenomena, but as refined presentations of the same fundamentals. For example, Fire is the life-giving energy of the sun as well as the life-destroying energy of a forest fire. It is the heat of the emotions, like love and hatred, and the red light of the rainbow. They each create and destroy, build up and destruct, heal and hurt, cleanse and contaminate. Each embodies the opposite forces that are inherent in Nature, inherent in our own nature, and it’s the interplay between these energies that metaphorically construct our world.
Element Earth
When we understand the inclusiveness of the elements and how they arise together, we see that everything is connected, everything is influenced by something else, like a giant interlocking pattern of a pearlescent spider’s web.
These four paintings capture the tension of opposites that arise within each element. Fire is erupting and also creating rock and fertile soil at the same time. Water is flowing as well as crystallized in ice and droplets. Earth builds up into high mountains and is weathered away into incredible almost skeletal remains. Air moves and shifts and is also stagnant. I painted these many years ago now and they are also portraits of dear friends. It wasn’t intentional, but the element I painted each of them as is also very indicative of who they are as people. It’s almost like their dominant Element was communicating their preference to me subconsciously. What would you say your dominant Element is?
Element Air
Here is my most recent YouTube. I’ve got a really great commission I am working on and it’s a couples portrait where they asked to be painted like high fantasy space elves. I cannot wait to totally nerd out painting the armor. Here’s how I start the first layer of the Mische Technique.
The opening at The Alembic is this Friday! If you are local, hopefully, I’ll see you there!
Love! This is fantastic. All of it. 💚