Dear friends, My exhibition opens on 23 May at 5pm, at Liverpool Street Gallery, 243A Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst, NSW https://www.liverpoolstgallery.com.au/aaron-aryadharma-matheson-artist-page  “To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing”.
Marcel Duchamp 
I am a picture-maker. I paint pictures in order to explore and try to make sense of my life. I find that reflection and emotion become more accessible in painting. My mind goes back to a book I read when I was 10 years old, The Neverending Story. The main character, Bastian Balthazar Bux, completely loses his way, his purpose and even his identity in a strange fairy-tale land. He is forced to spend years in a mine, digging out of the ground laboriously, thin, delicate images like fluorescent slates, which give him clues about his salvation from this limbo- finding who he truly is.     I think this is a good metaphor for painting, digging in the ground for images of who we are, the significance of our lives. Perhaps the state of being lost, often not knowing my purpose, is also true. Painting, for me, means to find the wholeness of being human. Some qualities cannot be described by conceptual truths alone - can only be implied poetically through oblique, suggestive means such as metaphor and image. (This description similarly only approximates the painting process, which is impossible to describe). Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight: The reason I make art is in fact to find out why I am doing it- a continual return to the unrepeatable touch of the breath, to the gossamer of a brushstroke- it’s recursive. Bastian returns to the mine to dig out another image. There is a friction between the aspiration of the title's words and the futility of their fulfilment, that summons both the fragility and robustness of dreams. “The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us. There is the same interchange between these two worlds that there is between one art and another, migratory passings to and fro, quickenings, Promethean liberations and discoveries”.
Wallace stevens.