Throughout my oeuvre the image of the boy or youth has been a consistent feature, nested within both extremes of surrealism and classical representation. The result is that the coming-of-age youth is a fundamental thread to the cosmology which my work describes.
The reasons for this are multifaceted; the symbolism of the male who is self aware cognitively, emotionally, and sexually but in between childhood and adulthood, represents an interstice that is in itself accessible to both polarities, and which is, by nature, still formless yet perceptually autonomous. Such a condition corresponds inherently to a prime conditionality of psychedelia and enlightenment; a being not concretized or conditioned, but still discovering, uncovering, reveling. He is not yet attached purely here, or there.
He is still plastic respective to identities of gender, still androgynous, still capable of a type of non-ordinary dreaming. He is charged with inherent vitality.
Taken further, such qualities represent the very hope for the innovation of society at large to turn over the paradigms of the old. This is perhaps why in older symbolic systems, such the Tarot card entitled “The Fool”, the boy often represents a contradiction of the orthodox paradigm, owing to an apparent chaotic nature. Seeded within his shenanigans lies an intention which gives birth to literal new worlds, should the real dangers of karma be overcome.
The psychedelic boy also symbolizes the inherent child in us, the incomprehensible being that is both old in soul and young, wise and given to zen folly, passionate and cool. He is unaccountable to the laws of the land because they are incapable of accounting for him. His process is an adventure of the heart and mind which, in its prime capacity, transcends all the structures and organized perceptions of the social psyche, and even of his own form.
He is ignorant locally, but wise cosmically. For this reason, too, he is by nature a forbidden fruit, an ambrosiac Adonis. His ambrosia is twofold; in the fetish of him lay devils of intoxication, and in the communion with him lay divine Tantric oneness. To merge with the psychedelic boy one forsakes all comfort zones. A new terrain is navigated instead by the sensitivities of the heart and the expansion of the mind, to comprehend a cosmology emerging ephemerally, as morphisms between hard physics and subtle objects of the psyche.
In the process of disrupting the tenets of his entrenched world, the psychedelic boy, through resolving himself, also resolves the karma of his relationships in the society. This is how he gives birth, expressing a great female principle, by producing an evolution from the ingestion and recapitulation of the universe. His Adonis nature is the inheritance of resurrection–destabilization and death in youth, like a chrysalis, to emerge again transformed into adulthood.
In my work the psychedelic boy is both seeker and source, reveling and teaching simultaneously. He is the Bodhisattva; a womb for Buddha nature, an egregore for the local manifestation of God, the compassionate avatar star child born to the terrarium of ordinary humanity. He is courier of a kernel of creative originality– through the tribulations of his local form within samsara he finds the path. By his example, we see tangible possibility.
