David Eubank

Always try to look beyond your experience and let your brain see what your eyes see. Ask yourself: What do I see? You can look at where you have been and if you are ready to face your own truth, you will see things that are in your field of vision. You will see the reality that the eyes see; if not you won't be able to see what is there in front of you. I challenge myself every day with the question: Do I really see what is there? The direction I take each time I begin the creation process may not be where I intend to go, sometimes it is like being stuck in a loop of known or accepted experience. Now and again, I break out of what I know, I can see something new, and then something special happens. When I look back, I see things differently than the time before. Maybe we as artists do not realize what we invent until we are ready to see our creations for what they are. Talking about our work can help bring understanding to the images we create -- if not for the viewer, for us. Abstract images and ideas that take us to unfamiliar places in our experience create difficulty in the acceptance of new images and ideas for us as viewers and artists. Often artists reject wonderful creations because they cannot see them for what they are, because they are unfamiliar and create discomfort in our learned experience. The viewer rejects the images for the same reasons. Language and images coexist -- one lending to the others content. But is this idea confined to the image? If experience is central to understanding the image, language can clear up unfamiliar questions about the meaning of the image and help us to bring that image into our experience. Language has the ability on its own to create images without the aid of a visual prop. The senses of the mind fill in that blank with what is known or accepted. However, the image the reader creates in the brain will vary from one reader to the next based on the readers accepted experience. The visual prop establishes a focal point that the tool of language can reference and code the image for us to create sameness in the visual experience. When the American Indian first saw Columbus in his ships approaching them they could not see the ships. All they saw were strange waves on the horizon; they had never seen a ship. A Medicine Man after allowing himself to see saw that these waves were ships told the rest of the Indians that the images they were looking at were not waves; they were ships. And they all saw Ships.