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Legend has it that visitors to the ancient shrine at Delphi, in Greece, said that one of the sayings inscribed on the Temple of Apollo was the phrase "Know Thyself."  Even though I have spent much of my life turning the lens of my art outward - looking at the world and bringing to life on canvas this synthetic, hybrid reality that exists in my art - I have always shied away from focusing too much on me.  Vanity repulses me.  I have never cared that much if people were interested in me as a person or not.  Yet I am overwhelmed with satisfaction when people mention my art with affection.  It's all I want, when it comes down to it.  For a viewer or collector to feel about the work the way I felt about it during the process of discovery.

However, I have realized, over the course of many years, that one of the primary impulses that drives me is an impulse towards exploration.  My art is one kind of exploration.  I look out into nature and I see things through two lenses - one being how the object is in objective reality.  The other is a mind-vision - and that is the painting.  When I take a cactus or mountain down in my mind, it goes all around my consciousness until it emerges on the other side...hybridized, and changed by the journey into unknown spaces.

When I was young, I was obsessed with narratives from the age of exploration.  I know without doubt that had I been born at an earlier time, I would have been one of those people who would have sailed a galleon off the edge of the map, into someplace unknown.  My 2017 visit to the beautiful country of Iceland also pinged this impulse - as it was so easy to imagine the early vikings landing in that stark - unearthly looking country, and making new discoveries among the volcanoes and black sand beaches.  I've also visited France, England, Portugal, Honduras, Costa Rica, Vanuatu, New Zealand, Australia, Fiji, and Canada - and a wild night of drinking in the principality of Monaco in 1996 :)

Neil visiting the Icelander in Keflavik, Iceland.  This ship is a bolt for bolt replica of a Viking Longship that was sailed to North America in 2000 to commemorate the Viking Voyages to the new world

The explorers impulse has always been present in my love of astronomy and space exploration.  Whenever a new lander comes down on the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else - I am one of the first people to log onto the Nasa website and peer through the veil to see what robotic landers see when they first touchdown in never before seen places.  I have watched the Apollo landings on the moon - all of them, with continual fascination.  Once during an interview at the Marshall Gallery in Scottsdale I told the interviewer that if I had another lifetime, I would be a space artist.  Because, after all, all the most exotic landscapes are on other planets and moons.  This same need to peer over the horizon is also the reason why I am fascinated by the UFO/UAP phenomenon.  Not because I want to shake the hand of an alien, but as I told a family member recently "If I could ask a space-traveling intelligence anything, I would ask what its explorers have seen."  What have the interplanetary Vikings and Magellans of another culture seen - when they penetrated into unknown places in the far universe.

I only recently realized that there may have been a reason why I have rarely ever depicted people in my landscapes and cityscapes.  They are not empty, of course - because you are there and you are looking.  But I feel like my subconscious has driven me to generally only depict the raw, wild nature as I saw it as a boy...growing up, going miles into the woods alone and seeing places that were utterly serene.  With only the birds and creek water for company, I realize I was a kid explorer, obsessed by visions over the horizon - same today, in my art, as I was back then as boy in the forests of Western North Carolina.