What's up with that Rock??

When people visit my studio, one of the first questions they often have is this:
why do you paint that rock (or is it an egg?)? what does it MEAN??? Anyone who has seen my work knows that I have used that image for years – first as an outline, then as a flat oval, and eventually as a three dimensional form. I think it started out as a cell or an egg, certainly both primary shapes in any time or culture. (Start to look around and you will see this oval shape everywhere in contemporary art.) My usual answer is that it represents a lot of things: life’s origins, mystery (what’s inside?), balance (as it is often teetering), the Self in various situations (up a tree, on a wire, stuck in a crevasse, supporting a pile of other rocks). In any case, I have felt compelled to paint it for years, and it has become almost iconic in my work.

But there is an interesting story about “the rock”…..after a few years of painting it, I went to South India for two weeks with my friend Charu. We went to an ancient holy site on the southeast coast called Mahabalapurim. Among the temples and wall reliefs, sitting up on a hilltop, there it was: “Krishna’s Butterball”, an enormous balancing rock. People see the photo in my studio and assume the rock inspired the paintings, but it’s actually the opposite. The paintings lead me to the rock. Much like in the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when the Richard Dreyfuss character is compelled to sculpt Devil’s Tower out of his mashed potatoes. In the movie, other characters mysteriously sketch or paint the form, without knowing why. As the story progresses, it turns out that all of these “possessed” people are led to that location to await the arrival of an alien space craft. Science fiction, perhaps, but in essence maybe not.

Experiences like this make the Magic of art-making real. They allow me to remember why I started doing this in the first place and why I will continue to do it, even as the current world situation makes that more and more challenging.
As I tread water in the stormy economic seas of 2009 (oh, please, sorry for the cliché), I sometimes see that rock off in the distance, and it gives me the strength to stay afloat.