One winter day, when I was six years-old, my mother gave me a Whitman’s Sampler box containing a few small tubes of Grumbacher oils and a brush. I retired to our basement and began painting, emerging hours later with a decent facsimile of an airplane, banking steeply across a blue sky with puffy clouds. That was fifty-five years ago, and painting has been the source of my deepest connection with my inner wellspring of creative energy ever since. While I have been widely recognized for my efforts as a maker of so-called ‘art knives’, painting has always felt like a gift that I treasured too much to risk tainting it by putting myself out there as a painter of works for sale.

In 2006 it was apparent that my last knife was on my workbench. It was my swan-song, and a pinnacle piece that told me I had nothing more to accomplish or say with that medium. In 2003 a book of my photographs of Maine was published and that paved the way for opportunities in fine art photography for which I remain very grateful. My photography is represented by a very fine gallery in Portland and has done quite well there. But, painting sat waiting, in the backstage of my mind, and I knew that taking up the brush again was what I wanted most.

Therefore, with the encouragement of my dear wife, Abigail, I set-up a space, bought new equipment and materials and began painting again. After a brief flirtation with aviation painting (that very first painting I did at age six was of a WWII fighter), I settled into what compels me most: rendering light and color in myriad ways, with passion and boldness. I also crave making images that have a storytelling component integrally embedded.

For me, photography has always inspired my desire to take on particular subjects and images. This remains so, and I use photographs as references, always trying to elaborate and surpass the qualities that initially attracted me to that particular image. I make changes according to my own sensibilities and inspirations, never losing sight of my desire to make reality look ‘hyper-real’. This is not, however, to be confused with surrealism, not at all.

This enhanced perception of the world is more closely related to the visual experiences resulting from the expanded state of mind associated with advanced meditative practices and particular psychotropic substances. I would caution, however, that this has little resemblance to the stereotypical view of such experiences that is common among people who have never had a direct experience of states of expanded awareness. Colors do become more saturated and vibrant. Shapes do not morph or flow —as some people seem to think--but rather take on symbolic meaning, both allegorically and metaphorically. A feeling of primordial interconnectedness—of being an integral and essential part of the wholeness of all--is also very often one of the perceptions, not only of the psychedelic state, but of the meditative state as well. Stories and their perceived meaning emerge that have been submerged in the minds of both the artist and the viewer. New levels of awareness and understanding on a supra-intellectual, transcendent, level can result from such explorations. I was led in this direction by my own experiences during the heyday of the Bay Area counter-culture in the early 70s, and then as a longtime devotee (chem.-free) in an esoteric order, but, again, there is no correlation to the mind-boggling, phantasmagoria that people typically associate with LSD and so-called ‘tripping’.

The fact that I am a tenth degree teacher in a mystical order dating back 3600 years also informs my work with a kind of ultra-real grounding. All schools of meditation have some practices or methodology for bringing the devotee into the present moment, which is actually considered a means of experiencing Truth, of realization. Being hyper-present carries with it the ability to actually see things as they are…not as one wishes, or fears they might be. At their most refined levels, the psychedelic state and the meditative state are identical. Only their causes are different. Some might believe that is a controversial view, but I have my own extensive experiences to draw upon.

The moments I attempt to capture, both on film (now on a sensor, of course) and on a panel with oils, all extend to the viewer this promise of entering into a singular point in time and space, provided they are willing to lower the volume and calm the incessant chatter of their thinking process enough to become fully receptive to what is in front of them.

For many years, I was willing to explain my fascination with qualities of light and how it illuminates seemingly mundane subject matter as simply a kind of magnetic attraction to the mystical quality we call Beauty. In recent years, I have come to realize that the real depth of attraction lies in the underlying feeling of ‘being there’. If I can—as a well-known writing teacher has said—“…invite the reader (viewer) into a dream and not let them wake up, “ then I feel I have accomplished my purpose, as both an artist and as a mystic.

Murad Saÿen, in South Paris, Maine