EXCERPT: published Feb, 2007 in the Source Weekly, Bend, OR: essay on art process "Creation as a Journey Through the Elements".

...Earth.
Chogram Trungpa, wrote in a 1976 essay on work that "Nohing is rejected as ordinary and nothing is taken as being particularly sacred." There is solid ground in this. The artist is nothing sacred, nothing mundane. Works are created, become a series, are lost in a warehouse fire, sold at garage sales, collected, admired, stolen, and replicated. A theorem is criticized, examined, accepted, implemented, becomes outdated, replaced by something yet beyond the atom: enter the quark. Music speeds up, becomes irreverent, postmodern, emotions are sung about, guitars are smashed on stages, hips are involved, new realities become songs. We shift our definition of safety.

Art is a grand and rich mix. It keeps morphing. What's infamous becomes famous, compelling, passionate. Yet it's just a room built on earth, of parts of the earth. Back in 1961, pop artist Roy Lichtestein completed a painting titled, "I can see the whole room, and there's nobody in it!" None of us is going to live forever. Let's have a good time, do art, be art, cherish art. Let art crucify and crown our brief stay in the room. Beyond, the earth watches and survives us all.