At the Still Point of the Turning World

I have been contemplating the place of fine art in contemporary society. How does something that has historically been rooted in tradition, universals, permanence, transcendence, contemplation...find its place in a world that is divorcing itself from all of these concepts?

Today our lives are constantly immersed in visual imagery that is fleeting and makes little impression upon us. There seems to be an immense wall of unending stimuli, an ever-pervading white noise that makes it nearly impossible to really see or hear anything in a meaningful way.

As an artist, it is hard not to ask, "Am I just adding to the glut? Or am I capable of creating something that might slip thru the noise; an image that might affect someone and draw them into a contemplative stillness?"

This painting is an attempt at communicating such a mood. It depicts a reservoir near Houston. Not a particularly beautiful place, being near a congested road and surrounded by urban sprawl. The setting is late evening after several days of rain. The flood had caused several interesting horizontal bands of land and water near the edge of the reservoir. The cross, it's shadow and reflection in the water combine to form a vertical axis that counterbalances the horizontal strips that predominate the scene.

It was the intense stillness of the place and moment that struck me. The picture's title comes from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets", a series of poems that have had the same deeply haunting effect upon me. The still point is like the hub of a wheel, ever moving but never changing. The purpose of everything on the periphery emanates from that center.

But today the center's influence is being eclipsed by that noisy wall of modern life. The peripheral things are all we see and engage with, rendering our experience of life all the shallower and more meaningless. As the poem says, we are "Distracted from distraction by distraction/Filled with fancies and empty of meaning." True reality and experience are drowned out by this noise because their voice can only be heard in silence.

The primary focus of my artwork is the attempt to capture a glimpse of this silence and to share it as a contemplative space, a window into a deeper, richer experience of the world around us.