“Proceed with the understanding that this is an art which demands special skills; nay, it is the greatest of all arts for it [concerns] an ideal entity which exists only in the mind.”

-Syed Nomanul Haq, Names, Natures and Things

Having completed 50 Prismatic Paintings by the end of 2016, and following a period of two years in which I was unable to finish a single piece, I set out to make a black painting, and the painting Prima Materia was the result. Therefore, I proceeded addressing color through the lens of alchemy.  

When I began these paintings, I thought that they would be fairly straightforward color studies, which is how I had approached the Prismatic Paintings. However, the original inspiration for Prismatic Alchemy came courtesy of the psychologist James Hillman, so it should come as no surprise that before I had completed Prima Materia (originally titled Black), and especially while painting Fog and Crusted Salt (originally White), I realized that I was not just studying color.

The paintings that constitute the series Prismatic Alchemy evince a psychic transformation as it took place beginning in 2019.  The first two paintings, Prima Materia and Fog and Crusted Salt, document mental states, somehow successfully returning insight from a deep depression.  Red Flame illustrates intense, glorious heat, with burnt ash as black in its center.  Granular Sulphur depicts solar energy overcoming lunar entrancements, and bringing necessary knowledge. In Granular Sulphur, the knowledge is integrated; unlike the yellow of Crystalline Sulphur, in which the black body is dissolved and knowledge is seen suddenly in its transformative horror.  Mercury plays with the idea of alchemical quicksilver, just beginning to consider a liquid metal that is ‘everywhere and nowhere’, carrying the messages of the Gods.  The Blue Flame paintings are a low heat; separating, dissolving, and slowing pace generally as ‘A nature is delighted by another nature’.

My fascination with alchemy is in the history of the practice as well as it’s modern application, particularly where it intersects with the psychological theories of Carl G. Jung. In this work, I have encountered alchemical language through color; I’ve acquired a dialect and opened new avenues of communication with unexpected entities. I now know something that centuries of alchemists, for all their fabled failures, certainly understood: transmutation makes living and dying in this body a thrilling, earnest endeavor.