The world Lorne Wagman weaves into his art is inextricably bound up in nature, but ultimately it is one that animates a wholly human experience of transcendence. There is a presence in Lorne's paintings like a mantra, it recreates a state of mind that is entirely interior and personal, it is abstract as a close-up or as ethereal as an expanse of sky.

Untitled, 1996, Watercolour on paper 18 x 24 ins, Public collection

In his weed series Lorne presented nature in all its unexpurgated wildness, as a fulcrum of dense, rich energy. The chaotic linkages between the interfoliate growth with added bright, even hyper-tropic colours, results in a heady almost supernatural atmosphere of euphoria.

The new skyscapes and cloudscapes are whimsical for their choice of subject, yet the patterns and shapes describe an ascent to a spiritual condition. From nature's chaos to the rich, dense detail and complex weave, the natural world, profuse and wild, parallels the urban one where he used to live. The patterns of energy we see in nature are incredibly similar whether in solid living forms such as bark of a tree, the patterns of a leaf or a river delta or in wave actions of water and cloud formations. Something of this universal principle of nature's energy emerges in Lorne's incredibly sensitive renderings of experience.

Cloud#9, 1998, Oil on canvas 4x6 ft, $7,500

Lorne reworks nature and synthesizes to present reality as we might see it in our mind's eye. The clouds are transcendent mantras, spontaneous and ever changing. Explosive growth, plants in a state of collective unrest, soil-clinging chasms of wild nature become an eternal idiom for nature's cathartic freedom. Lorne pulls all this growth and energy into his paintings only to allow it to explode, expand and reform into some kind of psychic meta-state.

Larger than life and smaller than a pinhead, this holistic experience collapses and expands at will. Lorne paints skies that are stretched and molded, modulated. The tree forms are fantastic eclosions, sensational evocations of perpetual recreation, of the endless birth, growth, death, decay and rebirth that is the holistic continuum of nature. This meta-state we see in his paintings is both psychic and real. It begins with nature, of which we are a part, and gradually the images emerge in the process of painting. Their wild abandon, chaotic colours and oracular configurations parallel the way nature's energy is endlessly transforming and recreating itself.

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