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What inspires you to create? "Magic. When you can take almost nothing, and make of it something beautiful that tells us who we are, that's magic. I am inspired by everything that happens to me! I think consciousness swirls around us like a breeze - all the ideas and concepts that ever were are floating around just waiting to be noticed and acted upon. I wish to take my favorites of these breezy things and manifest them as pictures- for unknown reasons it is mysteriously important to share the vision with everyone who cares to look. I think art has another magical property- it can communicate across time-sometimes hundreds and thousands of years, and still touch us both personal and universal levels." What is the message of your paintings, and also your own personal message to the world? "It's really all about love. Love of life, love of nature, love for the birds and the bees, love for all creation - it's so good, you just have to share! That's the message. It's hard to show in one big picture, so I share it in smaller pieces, each emphasizing a theme pertaining to the whole. There is an infinitude of ways to express this message, which is why we can all be artists! My personal message? Let's grow our world into a place where peace and justice prevail, where folks treat each other with kindness, love and respect, where each person has the opportunity to manifest their potential as a human being."
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Mark Henson | Erotic Nature
Modern and contemporary literary criticism makes a distinction between the pathetic fallacy, the projection of human emotion onto nature ("The sea is angry"), and personification, the positing of anthropomorphic agencies (like the sea god Neptune) as the intelligent cause of natural activity. From a rational stance, these tropes are projections of what belongs on the side of the human subject onto an external nature. From this same rational stance, what counts as projection and error within a scientific frame can nevertheless be celebrated as poetical enrichment and metaphorical potency in the domain of art – if not literal truths. What then about the status of like anthropomorphic motifs with regard to post-rational and transpersonal waves of being? For let us recall, pre-rational modes can be confused with post-rational modes, and we do not want to make a category mistake. Which brings us to Mark Henson's art. For in a number of the beautiful works on display in the current gallery, Henson discloses human lovers and goddesses as made up of the very substance of nature—elemental modes of coitus and sensuality writ large. But rather than pre-rational projections, these are post-rational intuitions of the energies and subtle forms that transcend, embrace, and vitalize the gross realm of nature: the theosphere, in embracing the noosphere, informs the biosphere through an agapic descent, transfiguring the natural world. The subtle realms of tantra are not mere overlays upon gross nature, nor displacements of and substitutes for the gross realm, but are integrated with nature herself. An integral art of the transrational erotics of nature.1 Michael Schwartz See now Ken Wilber, "From Stardust to Supermind," on the inside feel of third tier cognitive wholes; and Michael Schwartz, "Art and Third-Tier Envisioning" (commentary on David Franks' gallery Visual Medicine), on the inside look of these modes of cognition as disclosed in art. [Technical note: In Wilber's groundbreaking and canonical formulation of the eight indigenous perspectives, each quadrant is divided into an inside and an outside. The inside perspective is likened to a feel; the outside to a look. In my having read, with much gratitude, a draft of Dustin DiPerna;s forthcoming book, presently titled The Great Human Tradition, I was sparked by his further differentiation of perspectives: specifically that of zone 1, the inside feel of the interior of the individual, divided into two, a zone 1a and a zone 1b. My phrasing above of "inside feel" and "inside look" is inspired by DiPerna's distinctions.]
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