Description
A fine art canvas giclee from my painting “The Sails of The Self”
Artist: Michael Francis Lott
3/4″ thick (depth) stretcher bars
This giclee art print is created with high quality archival inks made to last hundreds of years and is printed on a high quality artisan canvas, with a charcoal brown rustic 1-1/16″ wooden frame.
Comes with backing and hanging wire.
All canvases will be packed in a plastic sleeve, and a cardboard insert for extra security.
*Custom sizes available! Email me directly at michaelfrancislott@gmail.com for inquires about custom sizes!
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This piece started as a mysterious series of dreams, in which a series of vivid colorful geometric configurations started dancing across my dreamscapes like a hieroglyphic language written upon the walls of my psyche.
And like a crazed psychological archeologist, I set out on the journey to transcribe the essence of this language into my art.
As I was receiving these dreams, I had a hunch that these dreams were a thread that I needed to follow, leading me to uncover something new.
And so this piece is a result of this.
I find it so fascinating how creating art reveals so much about ourselves, and how it puts us into direct contact with the unconscious intelligent forces that are flowing through us.
This piece has been a profound teacher for me, helping me to understand elements of both my past, and where I am being called to grow into. Because it is such a “paradigm breaking” piece for me, it has allowed me to get “outside of myself”, to see my life from a completely new vantage point.
For the past few years, I have had this bizarre chronic inner agitation of “being stuck” in my life.
It’s been so strange, because from the outside, my life looks wonderful – I’ve been living in a gorgeous earthship casita on beautiful land in Northern New Mexico, supporting myself by doing meaningful work with clients, making art, with good, good people around me.
But inside, I’ve felt stuck.
And I’ve been having a very difficult time working through that feeling, and understanding the deeper message of it.
I had a friend reflect back to me:
“It sounds like you’ve gotten way too good at your own game. Maybe you don’t know yourself as much as you think you do.”
She was right.
Needless to say, this piece has leveled me out to thinking with a beginner’s mind again, requiring me to take bold leaps into experimenting with new internal frames of reference.
Creating this piece was a potent journey, in letting go of what has been familiar and comfortable, and taking some new steps into uncharted territory.
In previous pieces, I have held a lot of reverence for geometry and symmetry, as universal expressions of balance, harmony, and order.
But, staying in the realm of pure symmetry and mandalas started to feel too comfortable, safe, and predictable, stylistically speaking.
This sense of safety and comfort started to feel confining, and the desire to break into new paradigms of approaching my art (and life) was building within me. I felt like being too focused on symmetry was starting to stifle my sense of creative freedom, and at the same time, I wanted to keep the undertone of balance that stabilizes more sophisticated themes and ideas.
So, this piece is actually returning me back to my roots as more of an abstract artist, which is where I started, when I first began painting seriously about 12 years ago.
When I first started painting, I was swimming in my internal world of abstraction, synesthesia, and my fascination with digging into the layers of my unconscious self. And for me, my early works represented absolute freedom. They were portals into my innermost being, and connected me to an indwelling essence that I needed desperately to attune to at that phase of my life.
And though my early pieces are where I found freedom, they were sort of wild. Random colors, shapes, and lines. Unorganized. All over the place. In full surrender to the unconscious intelligence that was flowing through me.
And so my artistic journey has slowly and progressively led me to finding greater order, harmony, and balance, incorporating more and more geometry- to organize and tame these flowing unconscious forces into something cohesive and stable.
The pinnacle of this process led to my recent work with large mandalas, and as understanding mandalas to be sacred universal expressions of order. And I believe that mandalas are quite literally the geometric expression of consciousness itself (light).
BUT the order within the mandala started to feel too stable. Too predictable. Too safe.
And so the desire to “break free” found its expression through this piece.
So with this new work, I am reintroducing my early inspirations of abstraction and creative freedom, but incorporated into a new orientation to geometry and balance.
This piece has been really pushing the edges for me, grooming my consciousness to operate within new bandwidths of both thought, and feeling.
And of course, with everything I’ve shared about what this piece represents for me creatively, it also very much reflects my own orientation to life. Breaking out of old, safe patterns, and exploring new modalities of self-expression. Challenging stability, in order to break into new and more elaborate forms of expression.
Sometimes we don’t know ourselves as much as we think we do.
What this piece has taught me is that we must continuously remain open to the mystery of ourselves.
We are a fractal of God, and God is the ultimate mystery.
And when we think we’ve got ourselves all figured out, that’s like saying we’ve got God all figured out. And God is far beyond our logic, and far beyond our understanding.
And that’s where we get stretched into exercising faith – knowing that there is a vast intelligence far beyond our limited individuated selves, that we must continuously be open to. Because that’s what guides us, and that’s what evolves us.
That’s why I love creating art as a means of making contact with the universal intelligence that transcends my personal “I”.
Because I see art as a technology of consciousness, to communicate with the higher intelligence that lives beyond ourselves.
In other words, art is a vehicle through which we communicate with God.
And so for me, this piece has been a literal form of energetic technology, through which I am grateful to stretch myself beyond what I think I know about myself, to touch the hand of the infinite, and to feel the breath of the Divine.
(This piece is also a homage of sorts to Wassily Kandinsky, one of my biggest artistic influences and inspirations of all time).
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