I think the first real experience I had with genuine inspiration, that mysterious tumbling of the cognitive wheels that allows a previously locked door to open upon an important secret beyond, was in 1989 with Invariance and Enlightenment.  I saw a woman in a park waiting beneath a statue of some kind, and I had the sudden idea of repeating the same gesture in a living figure of the present and a stone figure of the past.  I pursued the idea with many sketches over the next 3 years, but I was missing some essential component - which I eventually found in Plato’s Republic.  It wasn’t the philosophy that inspired the image so much as Plato’s sense of humor.  I don’t recall the exact passage now, but I think Socrates was humiliating poor Thrasymachus with withering sarcasm, and I was suddenly struck by the timelessness of humor.  In retrospect, I’m not sure why it came as such a revelation, but I was astounded that this 2500 year-old book should still be funny.  Some things change completely and some things stay exactly the same. 

That simple revelation, sometime in 1993, is where the resolution to Invariance and Enlightenment came from - a sudden flash of cognition when two isolated ideas forged a connection.  In my experience, that seems to be how inspiration works: bits and scattered pieces from many sources somehow get unconsciously assembled into new and strange formations in the brain.  I did all the heavy lifting (painting), but it certainly feels like some other agent did the important part by providing the requisite instructions: “You there - build this!”

By that time I was already working on the “Goddess Series” of images, which came to be the main thrust of my subsequent work.  These mostly pastoral images emerged out of two simple ideas that I borrowed from the ancient Egyptians. 

From the first instant I encountered it, I liked the (almost forgotten) idea of a Goddess of the Sky and a God of the Earth - or a feminine deity representing the transcendent and eternal (which I came to equate with Law) and a masculine deity representing the immanent and temporal (which I came to equate with Nature).  I never liked the idea that men (the inventors of murder, every weapon from clubs to atomic bombs, propaganda, war, torture, genocide, game-shows, etc....) should be naming hurricanes after women; the most destructive force in terrestrial nature really seems a lot more like Genghis Khan than any woman I ever heard of.  Mother Nature, in the “Wrath of the Weather” way that we usually use the term, seems backwards to me: the hard and brutal aspect of nature must surely be masculine.  And if that is so, then the quiet and beautiful aspect must therefore be feminine.  The obvious and simple part of the world, the hunting and killing and building and destroying, is (like the man) the expendable form; the secret and mysterious part of the world, the creation and transformation and beauty and purpose, is (like the woman) the essential function.

The second powerful idea that shaped my early creative development was the notion that the Pharaoh was a garment, merely a living coat worn briefly and then discarded by an ethereal and eternal presence.  The ancient Egyptians understood that their God-King was a man of flesh and blood, born of a woman, and destined to die like all other men.  But it was the God Horus (slain Osirus, resurrected) who was ever the divine mind looking out at the world through the pharaoh’s eyes.  The Egyptians believed that the immortal spirit of Horus would slip into the pharaoh at birth, wear him for the duration of that human life, cast him off at death, and then put on the new cloak of yet another human body, the next pharaoh, after that.  That which is visible is merely clothing for the divine.  This idea seemed to have enormous visual potential, and so I began to think of pictures of the invisible will that wears the appearance of the world like a robe.  The ever-changing garments come and go, but the unknown Wearer and unseen Watcher is ever the same...

In ancient times, the wise men and women that conjured such elaborate systems of philosophy and spirituality (many of which persist to the present day) did not think they were randomly inventing meaningless nonsense.  They made the best observations possible, and made coherent models of the world consistent with the level of understanding available to them.  In a world without science, it was the penetrating intelligence of shaman-poets that revealed wonderful and useful insights into the true nature of things.  And something still valuable that the ancient mind brought to the process of discovery, a vaguely irrational ethos that is almost entirely disregarded by modern thought, was the moral certainty of the interconnectedness of everything.  

Spatial connections are easily seen by everyone; temporal connections - the infinite causal threads of history that attach the phenomena of the present to a vast 4-dimensional sculpture of all past events - require a little more effort to discern.  And sometimes the connections are so strange and mysterious, it seems the binding aspect must run through some other domain entirely apart from space and time.  This plausible idea shines light on some of the persistent enigmas of the world, and has real explanatory power on matters about which 400 years of Scientific Enterprise has been mute.

The modern world enjoys a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of the world than that known by antiquity, but it is important to remember that we are not more intelligent than they.  We have more data - not more brainpower.  In fact, they may have been smarter than we: it certainly requires a Herculean level of cerebral fitness to carry an entire library around in one’s head.  In a world of few books, such practice was obligatory for any scholar.  Whether one is reading Plato or the Bible, one can hardly fail to notice the impressive erudition of the best ancient minds.  The expanse of their knowledge was very much smaller than ours, and so their attention to it could be far more concentrated and intense.  We have vastly more and better observations than the ancient world had, but they knew their observations far better than we know ours.  That intimate relationship with knowledge inexorably led them to see the world as a sacred web of purposeful design, a manifold diversity bound by the unity of divine thought and intention. 

I wanted to look at the world with that same ancient ethos, but bring that better data - the discoveries of modern science - to the exercise.  One of my early experiments in this regard was Isis - Child of Earth and Sky.  The ancient world had hundreds of sacred symbols (many of these also persist to the present day), and nearly all of them, in addition to some unique particular meaning, generally mean The Way of Eternal Life.  I believe there is a beautiful geometric shape, more universal and scientifically valid, that could (and perhaps should) replace all these others: the double helix of the DNA molecule.  It seemed appropriate that Isis, the Goddess of Life, should somehow evoke or suggest the living geometry of the DNA spiral.  After several unsuccessful attempts with headgear and the flowing gown, I began to play with the wings, and quickly realized this was the answer: the very wings that might (symbolically) carry us to the heavenly freedom of eternal life are here displayed in the heliacal geometry of eternal regeneration.

I began to think of geometry more seriously in 1995.  The ancient understanding of the eternal forms as an ethereal and transcendent Realm of Will and Idea was very much in accord with my own reckoning of the divine.  And the timeless mathematical nature of geometry makes it the archetypal visual representation of the Laws of Physics - the predicating code of the universe sometimes referred to as the Mind of God.

Following my guiding ideas, I wanted, somehow, to visualize an immanent (within nature) builder God and a transcendent (beyond nature) designer Goddess, geometrically integrated within a spiritually and scientifically satisfying design.  This brought me to Order and Chaos.  This painting has some design weaknesses and interpretive errors, but it still holds very special meaning for me.  The long journey from initial inspiration, through months of visual and scholarly research, to final design and execution, clarified everything I currently believe about the world.  It is my Damascus Moment.

And while contemplating platonic duality (The Good and the Demiurge, Yin and Yang, south and north polarity, static and dynamic) those many months, I came to believe that the fundamental opposition in the universe is not good and evil - a notion that is a necessary but artificial artifact of civilization.  The answer finally became clear to me as I walked through a neighborhood where I had played as a boy, thinking about the aspirations of children.  What aspect of the man is it that inspires the boy, and what aspect of the woman is it that inspires the girl?  And what possible relevance could such mundane concerns have to the biggest questions imaginable...