Bret Arenson was voted by the members and visitors of Universe Spirit as our Visual Artist of the Spring Quarter 2007.
Comments from the artist about his work:
"My work is a personal practice of surrender. All marks on my canvases come from a strong and spontaneous movement I discovered in my body one evening which I since have been committed to explore. The most accurate and succinct way to describe this is "ecstatic automatism."
My act of creating is always with an effort to surrender as fully as possible to this which guides me. The extraordinary experiences which this practice yields and the alterations it has made in my mind, body and soul are perhaps the true art. The act of making these images is a tool to an internal work. In fact I have found that looking into them stimulates the same ecstatic response that has me draw them in the first place. It seems I am spinning yantras.
The first thing I read that I felt had a real correlation to what I had been doing for over two years was Lee Sannella's book "The Kundalini Experience." Now I am willing to say that is what is up with me. Others have since confirmed this, but a definition is only a meager guide to navigating an inner experience.
As far as the thematic content of my work much of it is about cosmology and the transformative aspect of the interaction of material. I attempt to assemble a macrocosmic reference to what is happening within me."
Click here to see Bret's recent works..
Bret's biography, essays, poetry and other paintings can be found at www.bretarenson.com.
Contact Bret directly by emailing impulse@bretarenson.com.