For a long time, I have been a man on the run—not in the criminal sense. I have a wanderlust that, until now, has been seemingly insatiable. Over the years my travels have been both professional and personal. For about 35 years, the majority of the time spent on-the-road was professional. I know most hotel chains by heart. I have traveled long enough to remember smoking and non-smoking sections of the airplane. I learned the art of creating spatial isolation in a crowd. I refined my powers of concentration so that I could be productive no matter the distractions. I have flown over 2M actual flight miles. I probably slept in a hotel room over 2,500 times in the past 35 years.
As I approach 70 years of age, I am finding that the need to be physically on-the-run and in other places being subsumed by an intellectual and emotional wandering. I am not saying that I only want to stay home. I am saying that my purpose for traveling is shifting to support my staying at home and creating.
Interestingly, I can spend 6 hours in my studio now and think about the experiences I have had over these past 4 decades as if they happened the day before. They are cumulativly nudging my art in directions that would be different without having wandered the globe. What is fascinating is the mental atmosphere that is emerging. I am finding that the deeper I connect with doing my work at home the further I go far, far away.
We shall see what happens as I move into my dedicated oil painting studio at the beginning of 2016. Since it will not be a space that will be used for any other purpose and I won’t have to “clean” it, I can let it rip. Stay tuned.
This comment was sent to me via email from an old dear friend who shall remain anonymous. I am copying it here verbaitm for my records.
On Dec 18, 2015, at 2:36 PM, Jeff published this drawing/painting. La has this to say about that: Of all his recent works, this one best illustrates the current state of his Pilgrim’s Progress, at least to my mind it does, because I see, here, a recording of his transformative process, or the transformation itself (nod to Wittgenstein) of a highly structured existence now morphing into a new and as yet undetermined state of being. Jeff’s transformation. The dissolving rectangles represent an existence that required turning corners “on the square” … the dutiful obligation of a decent designer/architect, owed to a decent client. A life structured by relentless duties. The image of the unstructured cloud enveloping the rectangles demonstrates how remnants of his past existence are still partially connected and illustrates where Jeff is now: Becoming untethered, cutting loose, learning how to free-dance as he floats toward a new but unknown destination.