Fountain of Illusion

The Fountain of Illusion, created in Ubud, Bali in 2001, is the most finished drawing from an uncompleted project called variously, "The Ethereal Battle" and "The Mausoleum of Mankind". The concept was what I considered a "Visual Eschatology". Some years earlier I had a vision of the apocalypse wherein all things returned to their constituent elements. The dying spirits of the destroyed world were divided into afterworlds: Heaven, Paradise, Purgatory and Hell. I devised a system of Kabbalah-like concordances or intersections between these worlds, and each painting, 32 in total, was to represent one of these concordances. Sketches were made for all. The most finished image is the fountain of Illusion, presented here.

The "Ethereal Battle", though never completed, laid the groundwork for "Illuminations" and "Crossroads of Curiosity" that came later. This is because the idea of the Ethereal Battle was to present the paintings as double sided glowing paintings. Originally, I had it in mind to create these paintings on silk, but painting on silk and retaining translucency presents a variety of challenges. Years later I found a solution for creating this affect using edge-lit Plexiglas, and it happened that a new type of Plexiglas had been developed that was specifically for edge lighting. Using what is now called "LED" Plexi, and large format printing I created my "Illuminations" installations in SF, NY, Berlin, and Los Angeles (as well as at a few other places). This technique of creating lightboxes was scaled up to the size of the Crossroads of Curiosity (8'x20') and displayed at Burning Man (2014) and the British Library (2015). For these reasons, the Fountain of Illusion, is an important piece in my ouevre. At first glance, it appears to be a one-off, but actually it is the seed of significant works to come 10 years later.