My drawings constitute a sort of ongoing notebook. I translate and externalize my inner contemplative work in the form of esoteric equations which are worked out in actual notebooks before the drawings are made. With this data I manufacture worlds where the equations can live on a variety of levels.

Within these worlds clusters of equations play against each other, colliding and singing together, spelling out the internal circuitry of the territory. The information occupies a peculiar space which hovers on the cusp of illusionism, not quite reality or unreality, simultaneously divorced from naturalism but still sustained by the shadow of representation. 

One engages these spaces through 'sympathetic resonance'. At first they are approached intellectually through an examination of their symbolism. Beyond this point the function of their meaning changes radically. It must be met head on through the discovery of an 'aroma' of meaning which the mind 'tastes'. Through this aroma one can join to the realm where the piece actually lives. What is communicated there is the distilled essence of the content beyond formula and conceptual discourse. This most elusive aspect of meaning is what is discovered through contemplation.

The imagery itself is constructed from the confluence of biomorphic elements and esoteric symbols. The symbology derives primarily from a study of sacred geometry as it relates to Hebrew mysticism and Hermetic alchemy. The pictures also contain a great deal of poetic and illustrative text. They are meant to be read as much as looked at. Sentence fragments can be read vertically, horizontally, diagonally, or in random patterns. Because of this feature one can construct a great many possible readings of the literature within the images. 

The main subject of the work is to investigate the link between epistemological and ontological ends of the contemplative spectrum (what knows and what can be known). The central concern is how human ‘subjectivity’ and universal ‘objectivity’ transcend division in service of basic inherent wholeness. According to many generations of mystics this wholeness is identical to the original state of the Mind beyond the lesser concern of individual human identity or personality. It presupposes that Mind’s primordial essence is not the byproduct of a biological brain which is born and will die with the body. In this highest sense the essence of Mind and god are equal. 

The problem is that this primordial essence must paradoxically include all of the variations within it. It must be simultaneously the 'One' and the 'Many'. This is the key paradox that mystics must come to terms with: the infinite and the finite must abide within an equalizing continuum. The fact that human beings adhere to egoic separation is precisely the mechanism that obscures and obstructs direct recognition of this wholeness. It locks cognition into modes of limitation based soley on bodily identification (I am this body-mind). This insures a conflict between the self identified body-mind and immensity around it. This fundamental split is the basis of human alienation as well as the fragmentary and isolated experience human beings come to accept as ‘normal’. 

Mystics have always asked the same question about this dilemma: if the split between the internal knower and the external world could cease, if each could ‘swallow the other’, then what would be left? What is their most essential continuum? What lies beyond the dualistic extremes that obstruct it? 

For most people, what I have written here will not be very important. Either it will prove pregnant or it will not. This level of introductory contact is certainly not enough to exhaust the work, but it is my hope that it can compel some people to investigate the axiomatic content of the work further.

By David Chaim Smith