owe the discovery of the Mysterious Island to the conjunction of painting and music. The whole affaire happened some two years ago.
William James, the 19th century philosopher posited that in order for evolution to proceed, consciousnous was a necessary ingredient at the origin of everything. Contemporary physics, anthropology, music, and linguistics demonstrate that we live in a participatory universe and the notion of people as casual observers is illusory. The very act of creating a landscape can soon find itself occupying the space it seeks to frame. The dilemma this paradox poses for landscape painters has revealed a relationship between the landscape and the methods used to record it. In order to speak of these places, I must first start with a set of memories and then work towards the dichotomies that form their natural conclusions: such as how the notion of "wilderness" contains within it the notion of "containment" and how a reverential depiction of nature depends on technique, and this in turn reveals that I have created nature in my own image. Accordingly, I try to imbue the picture plane with what makes nature potent, mysterious and ultimately untamable while at the same time making manifest an awareness of this view of nature as a product of my own mythology.
