Gazing out into the night, I find it compelling the way trees, buildings and telephone poles become un-ordinary objects in a new mysterious space. Sometimes, the horizon disappears and the boundary between Earth and sky evaporates.Sometimes, it is both night and day. "Vesper" (the evening star, especially Venus), marks the time of transition, where the spiritual feels near and ordinary objects are viewed against the infinite. I think only painting cansimultaneously give reference to this i mpermanence and shift of perspective and transience of the moment. How this process gives r ise and how this affects the recording of a personal memory is where I hope to discover a neglected peace. A peace filled with both presence and silence that is both active and passive. For me however, this requires a balancing act of effort. Because our landscapes are often filled with the evidence of "violence" inherent in man's simple presence: his fields, his machines, his roads, his conflicts, his gardens and other traces of an ordered consciousness, I feel an unease with this meditation. But I think it must not be forsaken. We must look again at places to enter into the "center of our being" (where Dag Hammarskjold reminds us), where we can "encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way,- then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, (and) each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses". I must begin this investigation,- the "new hour" of night is at hand.

- Don Pollack