Across the surfaces, beings move through spaces. They explore, journey, and adventure in a grand wandering across the fields of infinite being.
The figures live playfully together, like gods who have only recently discovered their powers. Casting unforeseen spells and testing the edges of what can be made real.
The pictures may not always be the same world. They are from the same universe. They come from an attempt to reach a kind of new animism: a field in which concepts are embodied, and a sandbox for ideas and emotions.
Sci-fi and fantasy are almost the same thing here. What we are really talking about is figurative painting that is allowed to have a narrative. If you try to hold as many symbols as possible, and the old sense of a picture as a window onto a world or a stage, the sci-fi diorama is a natural outcome. Some works lean into that public face, like a seventies novel cover. They can lure you in playfully, then branch outward.
The main themes are creation and imagination, multiple perspectives, and ideas of truth. Fantastical landscape is a way to play further with symbology. The same licence as a tarot card, or the irrationality of a dream that still feels real. Why wouldn't I want the same freedom as dreams at night? The paintings do not illustrate a story already decided. Often the painting discovers an aspect of the world I had not known yet.
Eroticism matters because it is bound up with what a good painting is. There is a hallucinogenic eroticism inside all life. The works try to engage that generative current, the force that animates, overflows, and brings form into being. Eros as a fundamental force in the making of life.
That is what the paintings are doing. They are not pictures of a future we are waiting for. They are already an unfolding of fertility, play, and making.
Many people worry about the apocalypse coming, the singularity, a period of change so rapid we can't see what's coming. But I'm seeing that the world has already shifted for those who would like to step into it. We're in a world of radical freedom and unlimited resources, it's all really a matter of choice as to which world we want to live in.
The Fertile Ascent is the continuing movement and unfolding of creativity, fertility, and freedom. Much like the fertile crescent that was the birthplace of humanity, the Mesopotamian rivers that were symbols of Enki the fertility god. It's our movement toward godhood, creating temple-communities that look like places of childlike, playful creation of awe-inspiring beautiful spaces surrounded by nature.