BERNARD MATTOX

Chasing the Thing: The River Fugue Series
 

“Though solitude is not the direct theme of the work, it is the guidepost and first principle of having lived the last 27 years in the deep woods, some 40 miles from the place of my birth in N.O.L.A..

“I am more archaeologist than artist, forever excavating and resurrecting the strata of images from my own interior life, so what and where is the sources rarely litters of narrative in the traditional sense.
 

“The imagery in dreams is collective and available to all and you could fill the Astrodome with books that have attempted to interpret and account for them.”

 

Influential ideas…

Resurfacing (February 2017)
“One might say I had decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world. So perhaps I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves. 
-Thomas Merton

 

“As a life’s words I would remember everything—everything against loss, I would go
through life like a net. I would trap and keep every conversation, configuration of leaves, every dream and every scrap of overhead cloud. Children may believe that they alone have interior lives.”

- Annie Dillard, from “An American Childhood”