"Art increases my chances for survival in this world. Art offers me hope and helps me cope with loss. Art makes sense because it doesn't have to. I try to access the formative, pre-verbal expressions of my own unconscious manifesting itself. For me, painting is like dreaming, except that I am concentrated and wide awake. When I paint and draw, (I don't distinguish between the two), I seem to enter a timeless realm which I call "the zone": a state of altered awareness induced by the practice of deep and sustained concentration, as on an infinitely elaborate task at hand."

"Painting is a place which allows me to suspend my disbelief, a place where I may dream and at the same time express the dream I happen to be dreaming. "The zone" suspends my habitual awareness and opens my mind to chance and to change, and to an interior monologue so strikingly random it always borders on chaos. There is a desire sometimes to escape one's own known world; and there is another, commensurate desire to stay in place and to bring order to it. Painting lessens the pain caused by the chaos. Painting expresses and contains all it can hold. Painting is a lifelong consolation. Hamlet should have been a painter, not a prince."

"What, then, are some of my artistic aims? To meditate, to concentrate and to create a body of work inspired by the quality of my dreams. To tell a story that can't be told in words. To surrender to a rigorous inquiry as I practice the art of making dreams visible. To explore the spacial density of such 'dreamscapes', their veiled content and their syntactic compression. To allow formal invention to follow my artistic investment in a realm beyond my ordinary waking consciousness. To let drawn paintings merge with painted drawings through my use of the solid line, the liquid line and the line drawn blind. To watch the intuitive 'seeing' of free association unfold, and perhaps to suggest how 'blindness' itself may be thought of as a metaphor for the human condition at large."

Contact: ferismann@nyc.rr.com