LEWIS CISLE

April 5 - June 30

I have always seen the artist as a shaman, a magician, a healer to their culture, and their art as a form of magic. They mediate between their powers of understanding and what cannot be understood, thereby enlarging the scope of the comprehensible environment. The work of art, on a broad cultural level, represents the values of an entire social group, and on a specific level, the value of a family or an individual. With each public sculpture we display or painting we hang in our office and homes we make a declaration. We declare, "This is what I stand for; these are the things for which I live; these are the things that make life worth living." As each artist coaxes the muses to reveal some small truth in each work; each art lover acquires and assembles these revelations about him in such a way as to illuminate the present, the past, and the pathway of his or her future.

My paintings and sculpture have reflected my concern for the survival of the planet and all that lives on it. All things great and small need a healthy stable environment to survive and flourish. My "family of origin" series of paintings speaks of a child's need for a safe and secure family environment. My cloud and animal pieces remind us of the interdependence of life on our global home.

I was born the year of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and I am just beginning to realize how the second great world war has influenced my life to this very day. Like a shock that leaves its mark on everything I touch. War and the social upheaval caused by it are devastating to a child, no matter how far out of the line of fire he or she may be.

In a child's mind distance is not clear, that the lines of battle could be just around the corner or just over the next hill. As a boy I could look up and see the great battleships of the sky making their way to and from an air force base just minutes away. Therefore it's not hard for me to understand how a child could expect to see columns of smoke rising from a distant horizon behind which a great battle was in progress. Just as I looked toward the rolling hills around Hamilton, Ohio expecting to see or hear some evidence of the conflict in the Pacific in which my father was fighting for his very life. How often I remember sitting in a car with my uncle at a downtown railroad crossing; passing flatbed cars of olive green tanks and trucks provided a physical link with my father in the Philippines. My work about my wartime childhood experience has helped me realize how devastating that separation with my father was for me and is for most boys separated from the dads.

My work dealing with sibling rivalry are done tongue and cheek about a sister I love very deeply. Yet I realize how a badly parented sibling rivalry can cause enormous emotional damage.

The animals in my work are symbols of our interdependence with all life on this Earth. We have a greater need of them than they do of us. They are to me as they have been to human kind for millennia - companions, teachers and physical as well as spiritual sustenance. In my painting I honor this relationship and the many ways animals have directed and enriched my life by their presence in it.

Allan Watt so often said, "We are our environment." So we can see that as the environment that produced human kind disappears, so will what we consider "human" disappear from us. I shudder to think of what we may become in the absence of what has made us human.

(Transcibed July 27, 2014)