The Subterraneans

The summer that I became 15-years-old, I ran away to San Francisco in search of bohemian hipsters. I found them. I saw the city as a beautiful and enchanted place. I met a lot of strange and radical people, many of whom were writers, artists and muscians. I was given the nickname "the bashful bohemian". I began learning about philosophy, Buddhism and jazz. Before I left I had had some adventures, made some friends, but more importantly I was made aware of the French symbolists and some new American writers, several who were later to become known as the "beats".

The paintings in this group examine my life-long facination with members of both of the aforementioned literary groups; writers that I see as urban mystics. They include such authors as: William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Rimbaud, and Yukio Mishima.

Archetypes and Mysticism

My concepts of archetypes and their relationship to the psyche is based on the writings of C.G. Jung and his sucessors. Archetypes may be thought of as the "dominant metaphors of the psyche" because all of the various "ways of speaking of archetypes are translations from one metaphor to another. Even a sober operational definition in the language of science or logic is no less metaphorical than any image which presents the archetype as root ideas, psychic organs, figures of myth, typical styles of existance, or dominant fantasies that govern consciousness."

"Revisioning Psychology" by James Hillman

All of my art can be reduced to "archetypal art" but the paintings I have selected for this category are more consciously produced with specific archetypes or archetypal situations in mind. The images are not meant to "interpret the archetype" nor give it's "meaning" per se, but rather to inform and amplify the already conscious concepts of the artist with new re-presentations from the unconscious. The artist is both "author" and "viewer" of his art which once finished becomes "other" and is interpreted by him into a "text". This new "text" leads to explorations (new art), thus demonstrating a hermeneutic circle, of part (the known or conscious) to whole (the unknown or the unconscious) each informing the other. For further discussions of the "archetype", see the note on the painting "Jungscape".

The paintings in this category also stem from my interest in: Gnosticism, Western Hermeticism, Zen Buddhism, Vajrayana Buddhism (especially Nyingma), the Hebrew Mystics and Kabbalahists, some of the Orthodox Christian Mystics, some of the Islamic Mystics and Sufism, and various shamanic writings of the so-called "aboriginal" groups from around the world.