Letters to the Universe.

I don’t have answers.

But I have lots of questions.

Why is there so much injustice?
How can we protect the forests, the oceans and the animals?
What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a good human?
How can art positively influence the world and what is my role?

Questions like these have been pounding through my head through this strange year of 2020 as I prepared for my joint show, “Letters to the Universe,” with R. Nelson Parrish at Gallery MAR in Park City, UT. At times, I have felt bogged down by these questions, because I am not able to come up with an answer. I have long been a problem solver and my education as an engineer taught me that with enough creative thinking, there is always an answer, but I have felt very helpless at times this year.

I have not been able to solve the giant issue of racial injustice and inequality. I cannot save all the animals, clean the oceans, and protect the forests. I am struggling hard with what it means to be a good human. And I regularly feel like my work has little impact.

I began writing letters to the universe back in April of 2020 as a way of delving into my questions and fears with hopes that maybe the universe would respond with some answers. It was by a seeming coincidence that Nelson Parrish, a dear friend and confidant, suggested the title “Letters to the Universe” during the summer for our joint show. In a way, that synchronicity felt a bit like an answer.

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

— Rainer Marie Rilke, from his “Letters to a Young Poet”

202009 transforming again_50x40.jpg — I come back to this quote again and again in response to my ramblings and uncertainty. “Live the questions.” At first I didn’t understand, but slowly it began to make sense. We hold these queries and uncertainty close to our hearts, and in fact, it may even explain what it means to be human - to not know and to be uncertain, but to live, love and laugh in the face of vast unknowns.

In 2017, my fall show at Gallery MAR, was titled “Forging Ahead” and explored the concept of going forth into the unknown, despite uncertainty. We have all been forced to forge ahead this year through even greater uncertainty and fear, but all we can do is to go forward. And being human is just that - to live your life, to make plans, to see them change, to grow and learn, to have relationships and to struggle in them, to grieve and laugh, to love and lose. Back in 2017, I knew that we needed to carry on, but 2020 has me questioning the very nature of our human reality. And what it means to be human is a question that has really been at the forefront of my thinking this year.

As an engineer in my younger days, my job was to come up with answers to problems and provide solutions. But now, as an artist, I feel that my job is to ask questions, to push the boundary of what we know and ask myself and the viewer, what more is there for us to know? My art is a question in and of itself, a query full of potential to make the viewer think, to feel, and to learn. As artists, we are at the leading edge of creation and our job is to probe into the depths of our world. We may never find the answers and that is ok.

My ethereal, encaustic landscapes are an exploration into that uncertainty and the questions that propel us forward. The veiled landscapes are an expression of our lack of perfect knowledge about the world and how it operates. And yet, that uncertainty and veiled vision is beautiful in its own way. My paintings are an attempt to love the questions themselves like foggy landscapes and mountains we can’t fully see.

I have continued to write letters to the universe throughout the summer and fall, mostly asking questions, sometimes getting answers. I have taken words and phrases from these letters and used them to name paintings, which are a reflection of my thoughts, wonderings, and questions during this time. The universe has been responding to my queries, but there are no grand solutions to the major problems and inequities we are now facing. However, it has provided some advice.

It has told me to opt inward, to seek the answers within my heart, to trust my feelings and my emotions, to do the things that bring me joy. It has told me to live the questions, to sit with the very nature of inquiry, that it is ok to be uncomfortable, to allow the uncertainty to be present, and even welcome it as though it were a guest at the dinner table. Because in that uncertainty, we have a chance to explore a new reality, a new way of living, and a new way of dreaming for a better tomorrow. As Rilke said, perhaps, without even noticing it, someday we will live into the answer.