Paintings: A window into the Thin Place
There is a moment in front of certain paintings where your mind goes quiet. Not empty——quiet. The kind of stillness that happens when something in the work pulls you past the surface and into somewhere else. I don't think that's accidental. I think it's what painting, at its best, is capable of doing.
I have been chasing that moment for as long as I have been making work. The Celtic tradition gave me a name for it: the thin place. A location——or an experience, or an object——where the distance between the ordinary world and the holy one collapses. Where the veil grows thin enough that something of the divine presses through. Jesus speaks of rocks crying out, of the created world declaring the glory of God. I believe that. And I believe a painting can do the same thing——that a canvas, made with intention and prayer, can become a place where the transcendent draws close.
My paintings begin in the landscape. The open prairie west of Chicago, the tree-lined rivers, the fields that stretch further than seems reasonable——these are the places I carry into the studio. Not as subjects to be represented, but as feelings to be held. The work that comes out is not a picture of a place. It is an attempt to capture what that place feels like when God is present in it.
The process is intuitive and physical. Layers of collaged canvas and heavy applications of oil paint build up the surface over time——color fields interacting through gesture, figure emerging from ground, movement pressing against stillness. I don't plan my way to a composition. I discover it. Each painting evolves through a kind of dialogue between what I put on and what I take away, between control and surrender, until something opens in the work that wasn't there before.
That opening is what I am painting toward. A window, held just ajar——where a viewer can pause, let their mind move across the surface, follow the textures and colors and the balance of form, and find themselves, for a moment, somewhere else. Somewhere quieter. Somewhere closer to the glory that the rocks have always been crying out about.
That is what I mean when I say these paintings are windows into the thin place. Not metaphor. Not marketing. Intention.