Each of these moments is real and vital, yet of the whole nothing is certain, save that everything flows. What you think you know about the island has to be abandoned and found again in a constant process. As you hold onto a leaf, shell, feather or pebble before returning it to its microcosmos you learn to see not the names of things but the things themselves. The island subsumes your presence, like unknown others before you, into its fabric. Slowly you become more fully aware of what exists there but is unseen: the space around and between the trees, the ground below the grass, the motion in the water. Look deeply, and you feel a palpable connection that neither needs nor even has, words. An emptiness invites silence.

The island is a retreat, not an escape but a return - to the earth, to the self. Like walking without maps or lying on the ground looking at a blue sky, the island induces a contemplation that is receptive and unconditional like the start of a painting. "In my paintings," Mir6 wrote, "there are tiny shapes in great empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything stripped down has always made a great impression on me."

A painting finally works when its simplicity is recovered, its essence distilled from its disparate beginnings. So the island is itself a way for the artist's mind to return to a state of clear and penetrating awareness. In exploring this terrain, the painter is drawn into Chardin's elusive metaphor, "Painting is an island whose shore I have skirted":

Each of these paintings is an arrival, a discovery that serves not to end but rather to perpetuate the search.

Luke Elwes
January 2002