On An Island Beach

Amid the fog and surf on a French Atlantic island I made mandalas of shells and seaweed and tide turned pebbles nestled in the sand. Black and white spiraled out together, expanding back to back, like matter and anti-matter, two faces of the same energy made manifest. Nearby a tree of life mosaic grew from ochre stones and kelp while time stood still...

By the next morning the tide had erased all signs of my work. I found my way down the beach to a place where a cluster of World War II bunkers jutted from the sand like the remains of a forgotten civilization. In contrast to the natural beauty of the site or the calm, meditative state of creating ephemeral art here was something bulky and intrusive, built by fellow human beings for purposes outside my emotional ken... Yet, in a transformation accomplished by intensely colored graffiti symbology, this particular group had become a monument vastly removed from its sinister gray counterparts in Normandy or along the mainland coast nearby. Take a walk with me...

 

 

 

Layers of Time

A few contemporary marks made on the face of historic French buildings ironically seem to bring us full circle to the ancient Mediterranean worlds of Crete and Rome-- The first on the cathedral annex in Nantes looking mighty like a Minoan bee goddess or the same culture's bell skirted lady of serpents. Others appear farther south in Arles, where the cruel art of bullfighting goes on in a Roman era arena, continuing a history of blood sports and finding its way into graffiti throughout the city--- the images look amazingly similar to Minoan frescoes of ritual bull vaulters. And lastly the ciggy smoking Cheshire cat, though he seems to own no overt connection, lives here as the ultimate vanishing time traveller who sees all...and seems to understand.