While the world is locked down, this series of paintings, imbued with peacock colors, unfolded and mutated as an awareness of openness, where everything we have been and all that we will become, “shines “forth.

 

I am in love with the light in the Karoo, the display of peacock colors on the mountain top and the valley below at different times in the day. I remember an encounter with a peacock many years ago. This what I wrote in my diary.

 

“Sitting in a coffee shop, a peacock in the garden outside caught my eye. It opened its tail feathers into a spectacular display of exquisite beauty, and the heavens opened up in front of me, bespangled with a thousand stars, a thousand brilliant eyes rich with the colors  of the rainbow- opening a window onto a vision of eternity. I felt frozen in a moment of remembering something about immortality, that the sun dies and is born again, that the world implodes and explodes.

 

 It was then that Einstein’s words dropped through the ethers: ‘In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence; for he finds it impossible to imagine that he is the first to have thought out the exceedingly delicate threads that connect his perceptions. The aspect of knowledge which has not been laid bare gives the investigator a feeling akin to that of a child who seeks to grasp the masterly way in which elders manipulate things.’

 

This series of paintings in Peacock Cosmos, happened organically as an accidental flow of old printing ink, moving on the canvas like a living entity. I photographed the process of transformation and mutation into a living storyline of unfolding form in formlessness. It became a bubbling, vibrant diaphanous presence of involution and evolution, where earth was born and unborn, where form in formlessness fused to one, beckoning humanity to rise as the earth, the mountain, and the sun.

 

These paintings burst forth from the confines of mental space and became unfathomable singularities, each moment, an opening to the strange and wondrous “inward skies” of Rilke, where time is not linear, but a circle.