A note about process: I begin a painting without knowing anything about what will arise and it then develops and deepens in meaning through the mark making which generates intense inner images, and on it goes. It’s the mystery of those arising visions in consciousness that obsesses me. The titles come either after a painting is finished or comes to me late in the process, which was the case for Heka, 2024. I realized early in this painting that I was digging into the generative powers leading to my own personal birth – birth into my body and birth into Being itself – sexual, emotional, psychological, cosmic powers acting together in a particular moment. All my paintings are grounded in my actual experience, both inner and outer, so they are very personal, but then I keep working them until they transform or transfigure into the strange-to-me, the transpersonal, and point toward a non-dual state of being (a non-fragmented state that still holds the particulars and differences of bodily/psychic life but feels limitless).
So, the arc of the painting process is beginning in a non-dual state of not-knowing/knowing, the arising of intense inner images from who knows where, moving into the very dualistic state of working the paint and materials and accessing actual personal experience/memory - all of which generates new images - then returning to sense of a non-dual whole in the completed work. For example, the big painting in the Ruthann Gallery show, Near Exit 5, is rooted in an out-of-body Near-Death Experience I had in a terrible motorcycle accident in 2001. It’s about the details of that actual experience but also points to the vastness of the hyper-consciousness that happens in an NDE, which is a profound non-dual state of non-ordinary awareness – so the painting becomes a meditation on life/death and the mysteries of consciousness itself.
Fairly late in painting Heka, the blue creature coming out of watery depths with a white disc on top made me think about Isis. Isis is the supreme practitioner of magic and transformation. She knew how to direct the non-dual powers of cosmic energy (Heka) into the practice of dualistic change – the manipulator of boundaries and difference, one subject acting on another, eros and manifestation. In Egyptian mythology, Isis is deeply connected to Heka and they were imagined together in deep relationship – Heka being the god of the non-dual energy in which the universe is embedded and from which image and difference and being emerge, the cosmic whole that undergirds all separation and change, cosmic power itself. Magic (Isis) manipulates the erotics of difference, but magic is only possible inside Heka’s undifferentiated energy, the power that joins everything without boundaries or difference and makes transfiguration possible. For me, that is the primordial state from which all arises and to which all returns and is the sense I’m pointing to in all my work. In this painting, Isis is in the particulars of form and difference, but it is Heka that is the driving generative power. It’s that mysticism of deep connection, of oneness, of being Being, that I’m invoking in naming the painting Heka.
Brian Wood
Near Exit 5, 2006
Oil on canvas, 58 x 62 in.