Welcome! Let me explain what I do and why...

As a result of various birth defects, most of them not obvious, I did not fit in with the group. I now realize that the bullying I endured was, in part, the instinctive natural group response to eliminate a sick or defective individual from the pack. This realization has helped me forgive my tormentors for being slaves to their own beastly instincts. As a result of this alienation, I didn't develop social skills and graces or physical coordination in the normal way and had to make a concerted effort to learn these things later in life.

I came to see all injustices of life as extensions of childhood and adolescent bullying. Through my own loss, alienation, suffering, and separation I realized the importance of kinship, acceptance, and belonging.

Loneliness is toxic. Loneliness sabotages our physical health, triggering inflammatory responses threatening our immune system. Loneliness sets in motion a painful cycle of alienation infecting the entire family, community, and organization, causing people to lose trust in themselves and others. Loneliness can trigger the cascade of biological responses intended to initiate the process of bodily decay after - our premature deomposition "self-destruct" sequence. Loneliness/Alienation kills.

My Mission is to empower people to fully experience their relationship with all living creatures and with Creation itself, and to console and heal those who have been wounded and broken by life. My mission is to use my verbal and visual storytelling to enable others to experience a grander sense of family, whether with their close family, neighbors, ancestors, animals, plants, stones, lands, oceans, or the realm of spirit, and to experience the universe from these other perspectives.

Rather than merely selling a visual image, I strive to develop an ongoing relationship with the collector that opens a gateway for verbal communication. Some pictures need ten thousand words. I use my advanced training in communications (journalism, interview, analysis) and mind sciences (Ericksonian "storytelling" hypnotherapy, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Parallel Life Recall), as well as pastoral training, genealogical research, Asian cultural arts (martial arts, Feng Shui, Reiki) and Native American Medicine training to help collectors feel peace, joy, acceptance, and a renewed sense of family, even to the point of including medicinal substances, ceremonial objects, powdered gemstones, and other magical media in my paints.

Loneliness is toxic. Loneliness sabotages our physical health, triggering inflammatory responses threatening our immune system. Loneliness sets in motion a painful cycle of alienation infecting the entire family, community, and organization, causing people to lose trust in themselves and others. Loneliness kills.

I look out at the crowd and wonder, "Who's had their heart broken today, and how they are able to cope with having three assignments and a performance review due on top of that?" I wonder who did the heartbreaking, and why.

Allen Ginsburg opens his 1956 classic Howl with "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." Seven decades later I add "I see minds spiritually and emotionally assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, women without voices; youngsters with manufactured feelings and preprogrammed reactions; mobs with newspaper brains, social media evaluation skills, television souls with channels changing at random, and high school ideas. I feel for anyone who is in a place where he or she feels strange, unworthy, devalued, and stupid.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general, and the rottenness of your own life in particular. But this "realism" is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity and creation. The more you feel estranged, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, creating a self-fulfilling feedback loop of loneliness.

We artists have the power to heal our wounded world. The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see today are a result of the alienation that people feel from each other and from their environment. Through its creative power, art may trigger approximation, reconciliation and harmonization between individuals and peoples. Through art, beings can meet and exchange their points of view, as it rules out alienation and arouses neurochemistry and understanding. Art is universal and helps to cross borders and barriers without passport or prejudice.

Feeling alienated means you have a functioning value system. The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. We become like the young woman in the final scene of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", pretending an absence of humanity so that the pod people surrounding won't recognize her as prey and finish the job.

So at the end, fine art IS about filling an empty space, but one in the soul, not the one over the couch.

- Brian Wilkes