Exhibition No. 3 – oil and gold leaf on canvas. 1989-90. 30″ x 40″ / $15,000

Life’s challenges are ever-running stairs in sparkling colors and unexpected patterns. We take the tasks as they come and grow with each accomplished level; sometimes, it is wise to rest and refresh our energy before the next big step.

The pink in the east announces that it is already dawn, and the night’s flower drops a petal. The tiled stair wall shows how we see the “big picture” of life and the cosmos through conditions we face but cannot change: colors ranging from golden to muddy, the arrangement from meaningful to unpredictable, and sizes from important to negligible. In silence, a small tortoise passes among the dew drops, its carapace mirroring the wall’s design: an analogy to our individual passage through the years under the cosmic sky.

Note: The tortoise was the seed to its much larger “follower” created in The Long Journey (#60) that carries humankind on its back.

Similarly, in the origin, as Epochs of Mankind, Sleeper goes back to life-class studies.
The first transition from the study drawing became a watercolor. Through the posture I felt the expression of excessive exhaustion; a human defenselessly bleeding out all life energy. A cruel picture, but I did not want to paint a cruel act of violence. The overwhelming force, although understood to be human intention, is represented by a monumental letter “A”, with a strong association of a person standing with spread legs victoriously over the defeated victim.

A fundamental change in meaning can be observed between the watercolor A Like Ambition and a few years later the oil painting Sleeper. The basic “ingredients” are unchanged: the setting of a sequence of irregular steps in an open landscape and a reclining figure, turned away from the observer, releasing from the left hand some content. The symbolic meaning (or “story”) could not be more extreme in its contrast: in A Like Ambition, the monumental suppression to climb the ever-increasing height of the monotonously grey steps causes the life force to bleed out. The stairs are concrete-grey in a landscape of muted colors and the abstract demand in the gigantic “A” is clad in cold silver aging metal. A cold wind of inhumanity seems to breathe through the scene.
In the oil painting Sleeper, coloration, surroundings, and details have changed. A peaceful night: the steps’ faces are golden, the hand releases a poppy blossom, the symbol of sleep under the umbrella of the starry sky. The same exhaustion, but in the turn to recover by sleep, and the steps, still growing steeper, offer bases of rest and reconsideration.
The first interpretation of the scene, in the watercolor, is death by brutal pressure – and that can be outside demands or inner ambition. The second scene in the oil painting narrates the wisdom of resting before taking a step too high, beyond one’s present reach.