pastel rendering inspired by a Rembrandt painting..."Man with the Golden Helmet"

On this page I am expressing my creative process. It is somewhat lengthy but a reader will not really fully understand what is the inner character and scope of my creativity without reading through to conclusion.

I acknowledge that I am blessed with free, spirit-intuitions and I constantly aim at a path of bringing them through artistic imagination into practical/technical application. In between, inspiration is an self-recognised force. This causes in me, ever deeper levels of humility.

One of Rudolf Steiner's fundamental life's works...'The Philosophy of Freedom' has been, since my mid 20's, my true guiding text in the process of becoming more fully, creatively free. In this book it is revealed that this universal philosophy, as presented, firstly opens up through the reading, the way towards achieving pure thinking (intuition) and then attaining full, realizing consequences in life towards free-moral or ethical actions...deeds.

Real, freely intuited creativity is love in its truest form. This is a fuller attainment of genuine freedom...when we creatively love in freedom...not becoming deceived and confused with the many illusions of freedom (being almost entirely self-love) which run insanely today through the world.

from Steiner: (reference below)

"Just assume you could think in a pure flow of thought. Then there will come a moment for you when you have developed your thinking to a point at which it no longer needs to be called thinking at all. In the twinkling of an eye--or let us say in the twinkling of a thought--it has become something else.

This thinking--rightly called 'pure'--has become pure will; it is pure will through and through. If your soul-life has advanced to the piont at which you have liberated your thinking from outer perception, then it simultaneously becomes pure will. Your soul-life floats [is freed], if I may put it like this, in a pure stream of thought....pure thinking, and even the effort to practice it, begins to be not just a thinking exercise but an exercise of will, and one which reaches deep into the center of yourself.

For you will notice something curious: that only now can you really say that you experience ordinary thinking as an activity of the head...for previously you only knew this in an external way through physiology, anatomy, etc. But now you inwardly sense that you no longer think so 'high up' but that you have begun to think with the breast ['thinking with heart' or 'heart-thinking']. Your thoughts truly interweave with the processes of breathing, and you thereby stimulate in yourself something which the [ancient Indian] yoga exercises strove artificial to attain." ....(my underlining)

this is a quote from a translated Steiner lecture cycle entitled 'The Younger Generation' (GA 217, lecture 10)

further from Steiner:

"...in "The Philosophy of Freedom"--though most people completely fail to notice it--there is a mood which continually touches into the artistic element" ...(meaning the creative element)

this is from the same lecture cycle as the first quote.

I have also taken a serious interest in the functioning of the human chakras... and to the direct relationship of the truths expressed in "The Philosophy". Chakras are invisible-to-the-physical senses, internal soul processes of what is termed the astral organism.

The new inner path opening up for humanity is called the 'reverse kundalini'. This is when the flow of spiritual energy eminating as pure thoughts/intuitions, stream downward through a region over one's head by way of disciplined self-direction to the two petaled lotus flower and downwards through the throat chakra towards what Steiner refers to as the 'new heart organ'. This 'new heart organ' will more and more in future be formed and comprised by way of an inter-penetrating relationship of the 12 petalled lotus flower, the heart chakra, and the (previously 'secondary') 8 petalled lotus flower. This is the total reversal of what was once the practice of ancient yoga wisdom...that of 'raising the kundalini' upward through the chakras through deep breathing exercises.

This long developing process has been of historical necessity, a requirement for all of humanity on the world-wide scope, necessary for the development of a consciousness based in solely in physical sense perception and brain-bound thinking  So for thousands of years the eventual fuller development of the human nervous system and the attached brain organism as a sensing-intellect, reflecting instrument needed to evolve, to find an experience of three-dimensional space including nature and the universe. Now we also discover a perception of self, of self-consciousness i.e. awareness one one's self, one's thinking ego.

The results of this transitory deveopment has been and still is for most to take in sense impressions of our world,'digest' them with an essentially passive reflective thinking and to create our own independent inner world. This has become the basis of ego consciousness and a one-sided freedom.

But now we will see what must happen.

"The time is at hand!" (from Goethe) means that this development is now to become the 'spring-board' for free-intuitive thinking (from Steiner). It was previously necessary for the development of ego-consciousness in the material world with its 3 dimensions for the gradual awakening of individual ego sense of freedom. Now begins a reversal (since 1879) ...a process of transcending ordinary sense bound/brain bound thinking consciousness with imaginative thinking, creative heart-thinking. This achieved freedom becomes also loving creativity...we can even say co-creativity.

In this process we must not be deceived...we are being constantly attacked by illusory forces from within our own unconsciousness. And there are powerful anti-forces who know the great mysteries of the human being and our pitiful weaknesses. The anti-forces who possessively inspire so called human 'experts', 'leaders' and professional con artists, compel us into becoming attached to the compulsive fears and illusions of self (sentimental self-love or egotism) and on the other hand to a compulsive hardening connection to physical life (materialism).  

This is why the 'Middle Way', as the essential universal path of the TAO (DAO) ...between  two compulsive opposing forces...excessively Yin and excessively Yang, is of fundamental vital necessity now and in the future...in the overcoming and transforming of a compulsive fear of true freedom and of genuine love.

When I approach my materials whether on job site, in the studio or even teaching students...I try my utmost to approach all with clarity of soul and a completely positive and open mood or attitude and with full un attached senses. Through self-determination and perserverance, my trained artistic sensibilities and the self-discipline of a fine-tuned professional are what comprises who I am striving ever to become day to day. For me, these virtues are indispensibly and indesoluably linked together.

I seek to allow inspiration which has been gifted to me through many years of self-discipline and perserverance...to flow...to allow it to happen.