When I was eighteen, I went to an auction house in Pennsylvania. It was a fascinating place to be, but there was one item that particularly stuck out to me. It was a painting hung on the wall. It had a purple background, the sun sinking into the sea and an island with a palm tree on it. As I watched the painting, the palm tree and the sky within it appeared to move. I felt that I could have walked right through the frame into the painting and found myself in another space and time.

I have since then come across other paintings that evoke similar responses and no doubt some of you have as well. Perhaps you have been at a museum or over at a friend's house, and you've felt a piece of art reach out to you and draw you into its world. Genesis P-orridge, who owned a number of Austin Spare's paintings noted:

"In the same mysterious way that, if you will, a mirror can contain all that it faces in what seems an equally "real" world, so Spare's pictures can hold the entirety of the images and entities that he represents in them. They are there. The frame is exactly intended to be experienced as, and function as, the edges of a mirror, although, because it is a plastic, more fixed medium, we often cannot see around the inside edges by moving, as we can with a mirror. Do not be fooled by mundane physics. There are specific periods, when, remarkably, the opposite is true, and these images do indeed become exactly the same as mirrors, representing an entire portal into a parallel omniverse. They become living portals that animate, through which entities can travel, accessing our 'world' and bidding us into theirs." (P-orridge 2003, p 129)

And if these entities can come out into our world, it also stands to reason that we can do the same, traveling into their world, using the artwork as a portal to access the energy of the world being depicted. I have found this to be true with many of the paintings created by other magicians. For instance, Todd Heilmann, who did the cover art for Pop Culture Magick and this book, has created paintings that have always evoked a specific energy for me. They put me in touch with both the scene and the entities depicted within it.

I also paint, using water color as a medium, and I have found that while painting the energy of the act has been charged through the paint, so that the paintings become alive, charging the room with their energy and drawing people into the reality they depict. Sometimes, the paintings also act as a means of invocation, where the entity is invoked into the person by the act of attention being given to it.

Similarly, when I've used body paint, I?ve always felt that the paint is a medium for the energy to express itself and that the painting is a ritual. The painting draws the energy to it and the symbols on the flesh are created as a way of channeling that energy into specific intentions. My body as a canvas, nonetheless, also becomes a portal for the energy to flow through.

And with the creation of a gateway, art becomes more than just an aesthetic pleasure or even a message. It functions as a pathway to access space/time, to explore probabilities and manifest these probabilities into our "reality." I always find the act of painting to be one of intuition. I've never purposely picked out colors, so much as let the colors speak to me. The painting itself becomes an active participant in its manifestation of reality.

The painting and I act interact in the realm of abstraction and together make the concept into reality. I am the medium, the guide by which the portal, the entity, the magic is manifested. Accordingly, my paintings have ranged from being very abstract (similar to the kind of paintings done by schizophrenics, or so I?ve been told!), to being more concrete and realized and yet nonetheless not set in this reality. What I seek to depict is not here; it?s elsewhere, in my consciousness, perhaps where my consciousness interacts with other forms of consciousness. The painting is part of me, but it goes beyond that, acting as a way of drawing forth what I have contacted or interacted with. My paintings act like a lens:

"Time is, you see, a solid through which all passes, all is seen from a vantage point. As we learn to move our point of perception, so we act like a lens, or a mirror's surface viewed from above. Light, thought, life, passes through us, expanding outwards. We can place our mirrors anywhere, perceive them from any direction, thus we are potentially everywhere, in every possible time and every possible dimension. All travel is possible. We are an amorphous infinite density of matter. The matter is time. It is all a matter of time. Time is malleable and thus both the portal and means of travel. We can leave, we can return, we can cease to exist." (P-orridge 2003, p 130)

The painting becomes the mirror and the pathway to space/time, to other realities. Consider, for instance, when you buy a book. What draws you to buy a book? It?s no usually just the content in and of itself. You might flip through the pages and read what's inside, but the portal to the book is its cover and the art on the cover acts as a medium to draw you into the reality of the book. And, in the case of fiction books, often the characters of the story are visualized through the medium of the cover art.

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