Essence and Life Cannot be Seen

These paintings inhabit a landscape of nowhere, suspended at dusk and dawn, at the threshold between worlds. Where earlier work explored the green landscapes of West Penwith with creatures laying upon and within the earth, this series ventures into something more mysterious and shrouded: a realm where essence and life remain invisible yet profoundly felt.

Working from what I describe as 'a dusky cave of non-knowing,' I begin each painting by trying to feel invisible forms' edges. Wombs, placentas, foetal forms emerge: shapes I sense in my body, my organs, my psyche, existing in liminal suspension rather than earthly landscapes. I cannot see or visualise these forms, but I feel them deeply as they hover at the borderspace of the symbolic.

Receptive techniques including automatic drawing, parsemage, decalcomania, and planchette work allow me to access what I experience as a mysterious cosmic psychic net. Psychic material seeps into being, traces from otherworlds infusing the micro-decisions required to move paint meaningfully across the canvas. What surfaces is, initially, unknown to my conscious mind.

A progression unfolds through liminal states and sacred encounters. In Sun and Moon Proffer Roses, thick pink lines mark boundaries between conscious and unconscious realms, while forms almost touch but remain separated by lilac spaces. Yellow loops manifest as sparks from unconscious depths, threading connections between divided worlds.

As the series unfolds, landscapes open and peel back, lifting into sky. A Sound Emerging presents white orbs approaching across silent terrains where I sense crossing into sacred space. Painting itself becomes liminal crossing: 'When I painted it, I had a sense of crossing a threshold into something sacred.' Moving through profound stillness, A Sacred Cluster reveals what feels like a sacred innermost space where moon sits at the core of the sun, light allowing shadows to surface.

Luna undergoes visible transformation throughout. Lunar trails separate from orbs, either escaping or returning home. In Passing into Life, Sol and Luna hold each other at their cores, sharing dusky pinkness that symbolises borderspace between worlds. Pink boundaries create protective spaces, suggesting mystery as something around which consciousness circumambulates with careful mutuality.

I sit with these paintings as if with strangers, hearing their stories surface. Each form vibrates a different tone, speaks a different language, fading in and out of different psychic registers, organs, energies, senses. Recognition comes without conscious knowing, listening in stillness as strands of sound go wandering over boundaries into webs of otherworlds.

This investigation into the invisible reveals how essence and life cannot be seen directly but only felt through patient attention to what wishes to surface from spaces between conscious and unconscious awareness.

Essence and Life Cannot be Seen presents a deep investigation into the mysteries around which I circumambulate. Through sustained receptivity to the unknown, these paintings offer encounters with realms where the invisible becomes palpable, where crossing boundaries allows access to what lies perpetually veiled yet eternally present.