We do not experience nature through a clean one point perspective device. When we are open to really seeing, our perceptions of nature are non linear, non-literal, perhaps non-logical. So when I say “I am painting the experience of being in nature, being a part of nature, my studio visitors who are connected to Asian art nod and say, “Of course, how basic. That is Tao.”

Tao, like Ch’i, is both very simple and enormously complex at the same time. Tao, to oversimplify means “the way”. It is an awareness and acceptance of the “now”, of “being”.

My involvement with ecology exists in my painting as well as in my dealings in the world, and fits into the Asian concepts of nature. For if we are one with nature, then life, death, rebirth, and all the beauty and terror and fear of loss of our natural environment in these days of ecological crisis, takes on an enormously immediate meaning. This is unlike most Western attitudes (in which there is avoidance, or destruction, and/or control of nature).

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