Mantra 2, 18" x12", Oil on Masonite, 2013. I finished this painting a while back, but never got around to photographing it until recently. this is another piece in my ongoing "Mantra series". The idea behind the series is to do various free floating still-lives, and make them as dream-like as possible. They're given black backgrounds and I do many dark glazes over the detailed painting to push it into the black as much as necessary. This is an image of a flint stone and the fire it creates. It is meant to be a mantra of our origins as homo sapiens and the evolution that occurred after the discovery of the magic this rock can create. I don't have this series completely mapped out yet, it's still evolving itself. I hope to do five of them, but who knows. I'd like to keep them as images of natural objects, but I'm not sure if that matters. I'll paint them as they come to me.
or, How I am Learning to Slay the Mighty Blue Whale