One Image

I am an ex-painter from New York. In 2001, after twenty years in the city, I dropped out and moved to a town of 300 people in the wilds of northern California. I live off-the-grid in a remote valley far from the screaming metrosexual culture of Babylon.

I work on the computer, combining my own drawings, paintings and photographs with Hindu and Christian iconography, medieval and renaissance paintings, fabrics, patterns and found objects. My pictures are almost exclusively narrative, and are set in a sort of religious/psychedelic theme park called Zion Mountain. On the mountain Saints, Madonnas and holy men mingle with humble working-class people, hobos, hermits and backwoods bush-hippies.

Freud and Jung agreed that the contents of the unconscious are universal. In that sense humanity is a single organism with several distinct traits, one of which is a deep yearning to be close to the Creator. In my own experience with consciousness and devotion it has become my belief that all paintings are one painting, all images are parts of One Image.

When viewed this way the history of art is a vast unconscious collaboration, a great internal dialog hidden just beneath the latent content of works of art. Elements from one easily interact with elements from others in endless combinations and new manifestations.

In addition to simply expressing my devotion, my keen interest is in finding and manipulating these secret relationships and narratives that seem to have been waiting to be discovered.

Terry Rake Baker Zion Valley, California 5/10/06

Artist Highlights

• ArtWanted.com Gallery:    Digital Painting