Programm

I tried the impossible, to paint the song.
The painting began in 2016 either in the San Francisco Bay or in my Dogpatch studio using Pacific ocean water and SF mist as the agent transformation. It is on 8 foot 22 gauge cold rolled steel.
The Dylan song ‘Key West‘ is an invocation of the divine sound made manifest, a story of the intoxication of Love and beauty, a place of healing, escape and the ‘bleeding heart disease’. Dylan’s ‘gumbo limbo spiritual’ takes us through the Paradise smoke of the last American resort, floating like a mirage just beyond the horizon. It invokes a land beyond time that one can touch through music and slippery history. In this archipelago of forgetting, the eternal presence can slip through the veil of the song, right through that accordion moan. The places the artist may go promise they will return with the quantum radiance to circle the solar body enlight. But when you go to this Key West, this inner island, there is no going back, no returning. The artist forgets everything but the rituals of Love. In this act of song creation, the alchemist artist aligns his energy body with the Celestial Soul, a chance to burn with etheric fire into bliss consciousness / Immortality.
I painted Key West, along with storms of the summer, fall and winter, for years. Tree sculptures ‘Asuras’ painted with true indigo ink would move around the steel surface like an opera, and the rains would mark their tracks with oxidation. There appeared characters and presences – the Asuras, the old Tiger, the singer who becomes the song, The Owl, carrying souls between worlds, dreams from the center redwood trees, a golden dove, the Great River, a small road to the Lost Coast, a Giacometti figure, walking into the wind.
Time moves a very different way through this painting – it moves tidally inward and outward from the heart center, and from within each particle of form and space, expanding through the solar body, creating itself over and over.
Part of the American Story involves the imagining of an unspoiled paradise that awaits the sinner on the
‘frontier’. Here the paradise has already turned inside out, been mined and rewilded, apocalypse and beauty walking hand and hand. The surreal conjunction of the dream and the highway, Key West, a seaside between worlds where Love is the possibility of connection between every life form, where every broken spirit can create their Home on the Horizon Line.
There was an action that caused everything to change at once, a birth of the New Earth through a single movement of multiple color. A rainbow appeared on my ceiling in the morning, the sun reflecting on my BeLoved’s book of starseed. I put the colors on the Pedernal, a steel painting based on my BeLoved’s drawing of the Holy Mountain in New Mexico. I ran the steels together, in an experience of each chakra being combed through with the color of the new earth in one line of intensities. The song was now known well, the body a dragon of realizing color, Self realizing.
If you lost your mind, you’ll find it there.

Neil Enggist

Key West / Immortality, 2016 – 2025, 122 x 218 cm, acrylic, ink, charcoal, and organic material on steel.