journal notes 1979... 
  
    The model of the cosmos that eventually came from a series of dreams goes something like the following:

    In the beginning, there is nothing but a solid mass of matter in every direction, in a steady state, with no space, time or light, homogenous, virtually eternal, a cosmos of dense iron. 

    Then, one single particle collapses in upon itself, it’s moving parts falling into a solid core, causing a singularity and chain reaction.  It is a death or transformation of incredible attractive force. Particles all around it collapse and fall into the core, named K-Matter.  The core mass grows, the reaction intensifies, and space is formed between the incoming atoms and the building central core, called the Krallosvierd, or K-Sphere.

    This event rushes on with increasing momentum, the core becoming more attractive with its greater mass reaching the ever more distant edge of the void between the solid mass and the attractive core.

    After a time, the core becomes incredibly enormous beyond our current notions of astronomical size and distance, and the void even larger.  The attractive force ebbs with the shear size of core in balance with the vast distance it is now from the solid part of the cosmos.  The surface surges, swirls, and dances with material half converted to K-Matter and half moving in and out of collapse and reformation. 

    On the tumultuous surface of the core, now and again blobs of matter burst up and away from the wild chaos expanding as it moves out into the lesser gravitational intensity.  One such flare arches up and away, its shear mass tearing K-Matter out of the core as it flies away, like a comet with its tail following behind.  As the mass gradually stalls out like a gigantic solar flare, the following K-Matter bursts into it popping like a monstrous fireworks display.  Each bit of the fireworks K-Matter begins to full at the surrounding surface flare material gathering mass, spinning, building, and growing.

    These growing masses become galaxies, suns and planets.  In a small part of this flare is what has been called the visible universe, or the cosmos.  It is our home.

The Dream...

        The dream, and what followed, seemed to come in answer to a constant wish and desire to know something of the universe beyond the nonsense ideas I heard of in school.

    Though the original dream was vivid, memorable, and tremendously inspiring, it began a process of making attempts to express something for which there was no accurate expression.  From there, this process evolved to include ideas inspired by the original experience, thoughts related to books and research information in cosmology, and new dreams and images, and so forth.

    This is a personal process related to larger and more complex systems of myth and philosophy, but for the purposes of this book, I shall remain close to the domain in which I am most familiar, my own experience.  This is a journey through my own journals, art works, writing, and memory.  It is partly a tracing back of my own process of myth making attempting to reveal that which inspired one piece of art in particular, my 336 square foot oil on canvas, 13 piece, 24-foot tall triangle of paintings entitled, “Krallosvierd”.
    In my life, I have had a few defining moments which have inspired the contents of my daily thoughts and life long dreams.  Though the originating event is beyond words or accurate description, this process described above, this making of myth, has been in play in my life consuming thousands of hours of dreaming, sketching, painting, writing, reading, researching, studies and it is finally all culminating in the telling of this story. 

   In no time, once floating above the house then hovering in space seeing the Earth below.  The darkened Earth sat below with a bright crescent glowing in the sunlight, with little diamond clusters sprinkled about in the shadows.

   Floating above the Earth, with a glowing presence at my side, or was it a reflection, but a reflection of what?  There was nothing there, I did not even have a body at all, and the view was in every direction now.  The Earth below, the moon, the stars, the sun in view all at once. 

   The sun was suddenly smaller, and the Earth gone.  No feeling of movement at all, no body to feel velocity, and no wind to whip in my ears, if I had any.  The movement grew faster.  Stars dimmed and nebulae grew.  Galaxies beyond counting became the field of stars, and stars themselves gone away.

   Clusters and blobs of galaxies grew more distant, now growing fainter and fainter as I moved.  In one direction, the field of dimming dots.  In the other, nothing at all, only darkness never imagined.  The field of dots becomes a wall, no a sphere now, resolving into the shape of a sphere.  In the direction that was nothingness, now a wall of dim solid light, fuzzy, full of colors.

    The direction from which I came now held a glowing sphere.  Though it was of countless galaxies and stars, at this distance and from this view they all blended together.  The backdrop of this sphere was aglow with yet another, much larger sphere, fuzzy around the edges then surrounded by the black nothingness.  The bright sphere was dwarfed against its glowing background, now clearly round, with marks in it like sunspots and swirls and other glowing spheres in the distance.

    As the glowing sphere grew smaller, and even it’s background sphere grew smaller at this distance, the other direction became much more clearly solid, like a wall of dim light.

    Suddenly, flying into the wall of light, buried in light, nothing but light, becoming more and more dense, even solid.  Then instantly changing direction, the process moves in reverse.  Out from the light, into the darkness, moving toward the sphere.  Dots become blobs and walls.  Blobs become masses of galaxies.  Galaxies become masses of stars.  One galaxy, a crooked broken one somehow feeling familiar, grows larger and larger, until the stars reach out enveloping.

    Now in the wonderful, familiar canopy of stars of home, one star grows larger, I know it is home.  Closer, it becomes as large as the morning sun, and then there is Earth with a bright blue sliver of light on the left side of the dark globe.  Growing. 

    Suddenly, I am in bed.  In no time, I dreamed the cosmos was my back yard.

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The thirteen paintings....

   The 13 paintings of the Krallosvierd series of oil on canvas paintings, 1974 – 1988 are all 6 feet tall, and the rectangles are 7 feet wide.  The conglomerate is A 28 foot equilateral triangle made up of 336 square feet of canvas.

Painting One:

“Birth; The Beginning of Time”
(first in the story line and #4 to be completed):

  Steady homogenous ocean of atoms forming a timeless spaceless endless soup of incomprehensible everythingness.  Among the endless connected whole, one single particle changes within itself.  It collapses into itself as it transforms from a dynamic atom of mostly space to a much smaller, still, and solid single thing.  This event triggers a powerful sympathetic reaction in the particles around it and the solid single thing adds others to itself gaining strength in its attractive force.  This attraction and formation of this new thing breaks up the still solid around it and begins the formation of three new areas – the core of newly made solid attractive K-Matter (as the material is named); the broken up and pulled in area of the formerly still and solid field; and the void in between.

Painting three: 

“The K-Sphere; Balance of Nature”:

    This was the first painting after the name “Krallosvierd” came to be, and it naturally became a portrait, more or less, of the Void and Sphere itself.  All of the paintings are, of course symbolic of much more nebulous and abstract images from my dreams, and in this painting, the planets represent the formation of matter as the K-Sphere core (too distant to be discerned in this piece) disturbed and pulled apart the surrounding space. 

    The formerly homogenous and steady state cosmos has been disturbed and reordered.  A balance is formed between the distant attractive core and the outer edge.

“Void; On The Shore”:

    The heaviest of all thirteen paintings, Void symbolized a steady state cosmos gone wild with action, change and transformation.  The layers upon layers and rough texture, in contrast to the smooth darkness of the void, marked the edge between two very different parts of “space”.

Painting five: 

“Mother; Home of Our Universe”:

  Onward and onward this reaction raged until it became so enormous that the field of particles attracted by the core became so distant as to react slower and slower and the core at the center of the void became so large as to barely hold on to it’s own outer edge where even the far away edge of the solid field exerted a slight pull back toward it.

The core of Krallosvierd (the name for the entire system of outer field, void and core) teamed with convulsive activity all over its surface.  Collapsed K-material respacialized (returned to normal atomic density) and then collapsed again in storm like patterns and ocean like tides.

  Like gigantic solar flares, there were huge masses of K-Material that would fly up out of the surface expanding into the lesser gravitationally condensed area around the core bursting up to fall back into the fray once again.  This happened in terms of large spaces of time (millions of years) as the place of stalling out prior to falling back held a near neutral gravitational effect.

  One particular burst is symbolized in this painting represented by a bright white ball with many

brighter spots within it. As it burst upward out of the K-Sphere core surface, in its wake came a flare of solid K-Matter following right behind.  As the ball slowed, the following K-Matter caught up and entered the newly respacialized matter and exploded within it like a fireworks rocket sending small K-Matter blobs throughout the normal matter.  The K-Matter formed miniature K-Sphere cores around themselves in little models of the larger effect – core/surface/attracted matter – until bodies were formed.  These bodies became what we now call galaxies, stars and planets.

  Over time and effect, especially when the K-Matter blobs were very small, the masses formed became solid with their own gravitational nature and when the K-Material finally all respacialized, what was left was a solid body all on its own.

  The white sphere in this painting symbolizes the home of what we know as our universe.  It is a model of our mother system.  The centers of galaxies contain small models of the larger K-Sphere system and are in a way like children of the larger system much like a fractal pattern contains various sizes of the same form.

Painting eight: 

“Matter / Anti-Matter / Non-Matter”:

  The interrelationship between forces in nature, or “grand unification energy”, is symbolized by blended colors flowing in contrast to similar transitions on a bulls eye system of rings.  Everything relates to everything else, but there may be positive and negative aspects and attractive and repulsive forces in this relationship.  How to symbolize them as all related was a puzzle for which a dream provided the answer.  After sketching the shapes in the dream, this painting came to life. 

Painting nine: 

“Time / Space / Dimension”:

  This is a symbol for the element “time”.

  I must admit thinking about “The Time Tunnel” in the midst of painting this one.  This was a matter of making a symbol that I clearly recognized as meaning space/time.  The desired effect was to feel that I could just lift off the ground and magically fly into this painting.  It also needed to seem to move in and out as though attempting to reach out and grab me.

  Not knowing how others would see this symbol and define it, it was a pleasure when the first few people who took a look at it said, “time travel, right?” and various similar things that were right on the money.

“Synchronicity” (the largest scale model of everything...see yin/yang sketch at bottom of page for further thoughts):

  This painting was the last to be conceived and designed.  The next painting, Atom, was actually one of the first symbols I drew when the pyramid form was envisioned.  The larger scale cosmos space in the series was filled with many tentative ideas before this final image appeared in a dream so much larger than anything I had planned for in the entire piece.  This symbol represents the much larger context for all that came before.  If I took the 6 foot tall painting and poked a tiny pin hole through one of the gray bands (note that this gray is the stuff of painting one – the steady state solid stuff) everything else symbolized in the previous story, the entire Krallosvierd system of core void and surrounding shell in the gray stuff, could pass right through it with plenty of room to spare.

  Synchronicity is a vision of the much larger dynamics, interactions and motivation of the entire cosmos.  It is no accident that some viewers see a somewhat sexual symbol here, the orange and red circles coming to a head seeming to shoot into the rays within the gray and purple shapes.  It is an intercourse between different “spaces” resulting in the “birth” of new spaces and matter and life.

  This painting was the last to be conceived and designed.  The next painting, Atom, was actually one of the first symbols I drew when the pyramid form was envisioned.  The larger scale cosmos space in the series was filled with many tentative ideas before this final image appeared in a dream so much larger than anything I had planned for in the entire piece.  This symbol represents the much larger context for all that came before.  If I took the 6 foot tall painting and poked a tiny pin hole through one of the gray bands (note that this gray is the stuff of painting one – the steady state solid stuff) everything else symbolized in the previous story, the entire Krallosvierd system of core void and surrounding shell in the gray stuff, could pass right through it with plenty of room to spare.

  Synchronicity is a vision of the much larger dynamics, interactions and motivation of the entire cosmos.  It is no accident that some viewers see a somewhat sexual symbol here, the orange and red circles coming to a head seeming to shoot into the rays within the gray and purple shapes.  It is an intercourse between different “spaces” resulting in the “birth” of new spaces and matter and life.

  This painting was the last to be conceived and designed.  The next painting, Atom, was actually one of the first symbols I drew when the pyramid form was envisioned.  The larger scale cosmos space in the series was filled with many tentative ideas before this final image appeared in a dream so much larger than anything I had planned for in the entire piece.  This symbol represents the much larger context for all that came before.  If I took the 6 foot tall painting and poked a tiny pin hole through one of the gray bands (note that this gray is the stuff of painting one – the steady state solid stuff) everything else symbolized in the previous story, the entire Krallosvierd system of core void and surrounding shell in the gray stuff, could pass right through it with plenty of room to spare.

  Synchronicity is a vision of the much larger dynamics, interactions and motivation of the entire cosmos.  It is no accident that some viewers see a somewhat sexual symbol here, the orange and red circles coming to a head seeming to shoot into the rays within the gray and purple shapes.  It is an intercourse between different “spaces” resulting in the “birth” of new spaces and matter and life.

Painting eleven:

Painting twelve:

“Fire / Radiation / Energy”:

  The symbol of the element “fire”.

  The original idea for this space and place in the series was simply called “fire”.  When I first dreamt of making this series into a pyramid, I just filled in the sides in my mind with “elements”, and the first ones that came to mind were earth, wind and fire (also a favorite musical group of mine at the time).  Later, this simple symbol was to stand for something a little broader as it stands for radiation, heat and energy in general.  It is also a symbol for light though I do not put that in it’s title.  There is light in all of the paintings.

Painting thirteen:

“Cycles; Life-Death-Life”:

  This painting took the least amount of time. In fact, I painted this piece in one continuous flow from beginning to end frantically blending and shading the paint to catch a wet edge all the way around.  It was an exciting experience as I watched this light at the end of the tunnel appear in the 6 foot tall canvas as I moved in broad stokes and circular flares until it was done.

  The light and dark blended together represent the yin and the yang, life and death, and cycles in the universe.

  Sometime after completing this painting, feeling I was moving into another cycle of my life, I saw this image as I was driving North to Eureka late at night.  It was a lighthouse beaming through the night.  It felt like my symbol for cycles was just right, feeling that I move from light to dark and back again as I move through life.

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