Laguna College of Art + Design

As I return to the muse after a 20-year absence, I am a much older and wiser man in

search of answers to age-old questions. I had often looked for those answers in the halcyon days

of my youth when I was a Laguna Beach “brother of eternal love” and studied with Wayne

Thiebaud, the Master of the “California Palette”. After much reflection, I have now turned back

towards the Orange Sunshine of my youth, but now I view it from the existential phthalocyanine

plane of James Joyce’s chaosmos (life experience) manifesto Finnegans Wake. My first artist

incarnation was that of Stephen Dadalus in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. My

existential artistic journey has left deep furrows in my psyche, but just like a car works on gas,

my brain works on chaosmos, empty brain, empty art.

Through my MFA Title Series, I will struggle to answer those age-old questions by

drawing upon my life experience. My existential journey has enabled me to finally understand

the ever-evolving California Counterculture and how my outside-the-box paintings might help

Californians regain their cultural identity, which has been compromised by Orwellian

progressivism (“Big Brother”) who uses art as propaganda and as a social engineering tool.

“The artist like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his

handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (James Joyce).