GRAVITY

Apr 01, 2025

With head laid back and arms spread, a woman with golden blonde hair sinks back into a mound of solid gray rock. Her eyes are closed even as her face is turned up to the sky. She wears a white t-shirt and drab green sweatpants, but her feet are bare. Hazy hills roll in the distance beyond. Low-lying clouds mostly obscure the sky, but a pattern of crisscrossing contrails can be seen higher up echoing the pattern of curves and intersecting lines drawn in the round of the stone where the woman rests. The pattern is painted on the rock in strokes of varying weight and in the immediate foreground those lines seem slightly recessed. — GRAVITY (2002), Acrylic on Canvas - 35" x 43"

Once when I was being sedated for surgery and I was counting backwards, “99, 98, ...” I felt this surge of irresistible calm sweep over me like a vast tide of night.

While I floated away, I felt myself become totally, completely relaxed. I realized in an instant that I had been unknowingly living my life in a state of being clenched. It was a blessed relief to feel all the tension completely give way to ultimate relaxation—maybe for the first time in my adult life.

In the days and weeks of recovery and rehabilitation that followed and the exigencies of getting back to work, I forgot that brief flash of self-awareness, but fortunately the memory returned one night just as I was falling asleep. With the awareness came this metaphor for the experience.

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