About 3rd Level Holding Pattern

I wrote this short essay for a show I am currently in called The Elements. It explains some of the background of the included piece, "3rd Level Holding Pattern", displayed just below.

"My work is all done spontaneously. It is more generated than composed. It comes from an automatic ecstatic response which I follow and which diminishes my sense of participation. Because of this I essentially am not trying to get a specific pictorial placement or effect. It is not really possible. It is so much less intentional of an involvement.

I asked myself, "If I am not painting a picture per se, what am I doing?" At the base I am interacting with materials, doing so in an ecstatic state. The ecstatic experience yields a transformation of perception, radically so. And here the experience is inextricably tied with the material.
Through contemplation of this relationship I had this insight, "All art is the reenactment of the transformative interaction of material." And even though by this statement any art making cannot escape this, I decided to make it a central theme to my work, thereby opening the possibility of making the most reductive and yet complete work possible.

The materials used in this piece are very simple, a pile of decaying leaves and sticks and bark around a storm drain that I collected in the parking lot of my studio and which had the patina of automotive oil and exhaust dust, mixed into a bucket of acrylic modeling paste. I painted with this mixture with my automatic ecstatic approach, letting it dry between many applications of substance. I continued until the mixture was all transferred to the surface of the work. The end was a piece with a great amount of relief and detail.

My work has a certain signature pattern. Again this is not something I devised but have discovered. And what I have also discovered is that this pattern, upon contemplation, will yield an ecstatic response. Perhaps this pattern exists as a fractal in all forms of matter, but it gets a clearer exposure in my work. It is displayed in this piece on a three dimensional level despite it being monotone, which makes it a unique work being psychedelic without the usage of bright color or form.

The transformation of the material goes to the transformation of perception. The relation of material and perception is contemplated, bringing an inquiry to the nature of their distinction and union, a cosmology of the most essential order."