Biography

We are witness today to the entry of an ancient spiritual vitality into modern affairs. Poet Gary Snyder calls it the River of Sanity: an underground current which has run through all history, surfacing regularly to nourish countless visionaries of every culture. Sourcing from the deepest wellsprings of our humanity, flowing towards us from a time behind history, it moves us into deep harmony with the natural world. And while it finds confirmation in the frontiers of scientific thought, the River offers a profoundly wider way of engaging reality than science. It is caught rather than taught.

Against all hope, this river is emerging into popular view, gathering strength and refining its wisdom and ways to the point where it is now a parallel culture offering genuine alternatives to a parched mainstream civilization.

I move within a new tradition being shaped by an intuitive, archaic response to spiritual need. It assumes many forms. It has something to do with 'the re-enchantment of art’. It has little to do with what critic Robert Hughes calls “the grim international style” of the Academy. It is a returning to the primeval initiatory authority of art, which sees an artistic creation not so much as a thing but a field, a catalyst to a range of internal perceptions we hardly encounter today.

My work is directed toward the unfolding of this new–old tradition. In bringing any piece to its maturity I see my role as simply to ascertain and fulfill its needs, using whatever media and technique necessary. In this way I have had to develop a wide range of skills, and an extremely fluid style. Or non–style.

Short History

Born in 1943; graduate, New York University; attended film school; studied at the University of Sao Paulo and traveled the Amazon. Conscientious Objector during Vietnam War. Joined the legendary Millbrook community, worked on germinal light shows with Dr. Timothy Leary. Participated in a variety of tribal societies including the Mohawks of Akwesasne reservation, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love in the California desert, and a Tamil ashram in northern Ceylon. Studied various traditions and systems of art: Celtic & Early Christian; Hindu Tantric; Tibetan; Japanese; Native American; Early Renaissance; Aboriginal, Persian. Lived in a tipi in Woodstock, New York, started meditation center/macrobiotic restaurant, finally moved to Pennsylvania to study with the venerable Sufi master Bawa Muhaiyaddeen..

I have been a wandering monk, householder, artist and craftsman, sign painter, landscaper, television art director, architect, illustrator and author (With about 2,500,000 books in print.)

My career as an artist is somewhat difficult to catalogue. Most of my creative life has been in the tradition of the nameless shamanic artisan–an unbroken tradition reaching all the way back to the Paleolithic cave-painters. Whether a mask, or a circle of stones, a tanka, a chant, a ritual, or even a perfect gesture–this primeval art of the sacred is characterized by the conscious intention not to express, but to abandon the self–and in so doing, open a doorway to the Great Mystery.

I naturally engage in the making of ceremonial environments and ritual artifacts. This work can be found around the country–not in collections, but in use. There is Stone Circle, where Leonard Crow Dog led his medicine ceremony; and Taiowa, a Shinto/Golden Mean meditation house, and the Riverby ceremonial complex, scene of numerous solstice ceremonies. There is Alignments Hill in Millbrook New York, and the Mazar, in Chester County, Pennsylvania, visited now by pilgrims from around the world. Important works where important things happen–but not to be found in any catalogue. No reviews, no signature: the shamanic artist is a catalyst directing our attention to the sacred. Self-expression is irrelevant. This is a creative dimension at almost total remove from the personality-driven canons of contemporary art.