The Collective Field
So this is where it started: Cease Fire Machine. I made it a long time ago, back in 2011. Script runs across the top, edge to edge, and underneath is a field. Figures, a wheel, a ladder, 2 green bands running up through the middle. I didn’t know it then, but the whole language was already in there. It took me years to learn to read it.
For a lot of years I’ve been building that language inside my paintings. Ladders. Rain. Hands reaching up out of the ground. Ships in the upper air. 1 word left whole in a field of script. These marks keep coming back, painting after painting. I never planned them. They just keep showing up, because they carry something.
The Collective Field is all of my new work. 100 paintings, 1 language running through every one of them.
The series is about 1 recognition. We’re a collective. The self we defend so hard is a small part of a much bigger field, and the field is where life happens.
Look at what’s happening right now. Water fought over. Borders sealing, treaties freezing, feeds going dark. Attention hunted, all day and all night. More information than any people in history, and less shared reality. It all grows from the same root, which is the separate self, grasping.
I see how we’re dealing with it, too. Mostly we grip. It’s the same thing I do in the studio when a painting’s going sideways. My hand tightens up, my shoulders come up, and the line I put down just dies. Same body, same tightness. Only now it’s all of us.
When you sit with your mind for 5 to 7 days, early on you’re just watching it rage. Every little thing, every crazy direction. Then it quiets down, because it has to. That’s when you see what’s really going on. I’ve been sitting for over 20 years, and I think that’s where we are right now, together. The collective mind is raging. And it can only do that for so long.
So every painting in this series holds a condition of our moment. And every painting holds the practice that meets it. Stillness. Acceptance. Clear seeing. Moving like water. Zen taught me that everything is a teaching. These paintings set the teaching right next to the headlines, so you can see both at once.
The first works go like this.
What’s coming. Ready or Not is the one that fought me. Ships cross the upper air and drop their weather, and down below, hands reach up out of the ground. Things arrive whether we’re ready or not. Readiness lives in a quiet mind. Battle for Water is blue on blue on blue, with a painting from 2012 still showing through underneath. Water yields, and water wins. Upstream and downstream are 1 river.
What we do without knowing. Shut It Down. Clear as Mud. The Hunt. Cessation of the Mind. We close up under strain. We stir the water and wonder why it’s muddy. We chase what’s already here. Stopping is an act, and it’s probably the hardest thing I do. But a quiet person changes the whole room.
The way forward. Garden of Experience is 3 panels and 1 ground. Everything that falls becomes soil. What we live through together, we break down together, and we grow from together. Then Ananda, which means bliss, joy right in the middle of the crowd. Beyond Greed, Anger & Delusion, the 3 poisons, with the rest of the canvas moving around them. En La Tierra Yace La Luz. In the earth lies the light.
In the flow state. Good Cop Bad Cop, Seeds of Change, Flux. See both faces, then climb. Change starts below the surface. Everything moves, and we move together.
Metamorphosis. Actualization, Fully Realized, Alchemy. Up near the top of Actualization I wrote “the eye that never sleeps.” That’s awareness. It’s always on, underneath everything. Alchemy was never about gold. The work changes the one doing it.
Here’s the part that’s new for me. My partner reads people. She reads a person’s operating codes, and the codes from the field they’re ready to bring in. I put those codes on canvas as indicators. You live with the painting, and it keeps working on you.
A painting lives in your home kind of like a person does. At first you notice the obvious stuff, the colors and the size. Then over the months it starts showing you other things. The light changes and something you never saw comes forward. Years go by and it’s still telling you something new. That’s what I hope for every piece that leaves the studio.
Ram Dass said we’re all just walking each other home. That’s the work. A painting on a wall, quietly saying what it says, year after year, while the world does what it does.
So come into the field. Come see the work. Stand in front of a painting longer than feels normal. Bring me what you’re drawn to, even if you can’t name it yet, and we’ll find it together.
The change begins in the one who looks. The time is now.