I finally tracked down the book that contains the seed that generated the title for this series of paintings: Ararat by D.M. Thomas (1984). The original sentence - that I can’t recall accurately (it was nearly forty years ago!) - linked the building of inner and outer worlds. At the time, the sentence hit me as a bolt of beautiful insight. Each of us constructs a self from an interplay of the things we sense in the outside world (the landscape we see) with our always-evolving sense of self. Our inside world shapes the things we see and that we are convinced is an outer reality. The painting also references Miro’s Blue II (ah - Miro ….) through its collection of randomly-placed rocks, a toetoe seed head from the front lawn at The Chateau Tongariro Hotel (dressed ostentatiously in the style of Schnabel’s random white intrusions), and a papaya in the style of the “wound of Christ” from Taschen’s Book of Symbols (2010). All are pulled together by the ethereal framework of a central character of my last few years: OK Girl - a feminine presence who makes the most of absolutely everything, shaped with audacity by the thumbs of Sissy Hankshaw (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins, 1976). In my mind as I paint is the comfortable, settled emergence of an increasingly replete soul into consciousness that rewards those of senior years. All, yes all, is bathed in the golden light of early morning that stewards the gentle transition from outrageous dreams to the more measured and measurable, wakeful, part of the day.