The Garden is the place of unity, of nonduality of male and female, good and bad, God and human beings...Getting back into that Garden is the aim of many a religion. - Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

These paintings, done in the 70's and early 80's, have an elusive, enigmatic quality, suggestive of the world of dreams and the subconscious. Central to the pictorial symbiology of these paintings is the image of the garden. And not the conventional plot of shrub and rose, but an unnerving, artificial beauty, captured with a somewhat severe clarity.

For me, a garden is a respite, a sanctuary, a prayer; a studio, a home, a body. But what is depicted here? Private gardens, treehouse sanctuaries, suspended bodies of water. Mysterious but oddly familiar, dense with visible energy.

Where do these images come from? How does an artist come to the symbiology they put in their work? Memory and perception. Isn't so much of it memory and perception? It is not a simple question- but often it is our earliest experiences which shape the answer. In thinking about this, I look back at the time when I was 4 or 5. I have riveting memories of beautifully illustrated picture books which my mother read aloud to me nightly. One favorite book was a Little Golden Book called God. It had a picture of a young girl looking at the evening stars. What struck me about this formative childhood image was that there was a lovely rivulet of water leading right up the back lawn to the little girl's house. To me, it appeared that one could go out her door and walk right onto water. What a very beautiful place! This image represents, for me, perhaps the first important equation of visual beauty and visual intensity with the idea of God, or mysticism.

I am very partial to the impact of Quattrocento Annunciation scenes. There is a great deal of tension between the gesture of the Archangel and the Virgin- his forward with the proclamation, and hers backward in response, the whole drama taking place in a tightly enclosed space. It is an amazing unity of concept and construct- the aesthetics tingle with the presence of the message: the mystery of the Holy Spirit.

It is this sense of a stirring spatial beauty, both open and enclosed, private and shared, that inhabits the world of the Vintage paintings. Pieces like Sanctuary, and Private Forest reflect the same kind of spatial intensity that a child experiences in a playhouse, a treehouse, or a tent. It is the kind of space that promotes focus and a high state of mental absorption.

These works also reflect on the fierce beauty of even the smallest parts of nature, and how each piece is so detailed and striking within its specific brilliance. (Non)Sense of Boundaries and It Appeared to Me Clear One Night speak of simultaneity, relativity, and the visionary quest to realize the extraordinary within the ordinary. Our intuition tells us that many things occur beyond the grasp of our senses and intellect. This is the feeling behind the root of my search. As Albert Einstein has said: "It is the mysteriousness of life that is at the heart of all true art and science. And it is in this respect, and only in this respect, that I count myself amongst the most religious of persons".