"The Unknown Path of a Stationary Sphere"

Semi Abstract Sphere

This is a tough painting to explain. It dates back to the early 2000s, maybe it was started 2003, unfortunately I don't remember. I can generally tell the age of my work by the stretchers I was using, the canvas I was using, and sometimes the style.

This is one of those paintings that was started during the last part of my drinking and drugging days. I say that it was started because it wasn't completed back then and somehow it survived and traveled with me all the way into the year 2015, when it was completed.

I've been clean and sober for almost 20 years now, and I finished this painting well into my years of sobriety. I've always loved it because it has a nice raw feel. The subject matter is super simple, the landscape is calming, and it has just enough chaos to balance the peace for my mind.

The three-dimensional sphere in the center is somewhat typical for that time frame. What's more typical is it sitting on a flat sphere which for me always represented netting that was left at the beach or those washed up on the shore. The edges of the netting always catch seeds and there seems to be weeds that grow from there, very analogous of our lives, BTW.

I spent 4 years of my life on the island of Oahu. When I was a kid, my mom used to take us to Bellows beach on the southeast side of the island. You could see rabbit head Island from the beach, and we would drive by it on our way home. I've seen that island from afar off hundreds of times and it just has a special shape in my brain. I remember staring at the island as we drove by it and my imagination would run wild with what it would be like to live there or be on the island alone.

The entire shape of the island remains picture perfect in my head and appears in many ways throughout the decades in my paintings. A lot of my work back then was, consequently, based on land with the viewer looking out towards an island which is all analogous to something, what depends on the viewer really.

The title is the thought that nobody really knows the path, or future anything is going to take. It’s impossible to control the outcome of the inevitable. It’s valuable to me and therefore priced out as such.