It seems pretty obvious that I would fall for Jay Marsh's paintings. In the middle of a Volcano Series in my own work, and a reader of Sci-Fi novels à la Dune (some fantastically depopulated version of whose covers the paintings sometimes resemble), how could I help but find them fabulous?

For me the paintings exist on a couple of different planes simultaneously: in the Landscape Primeval, and in the Landscape of the Soul. They feel like immense earthy cycloramas of The Comet and the Ice Age (sans perishing brontosauruses), and they also feel like visual metaphors for life-force expressing itself through birth and death.

Year-in-review stories for 2005 made much of last year's fearsome tally of natural destruction: the tsunami, the hurricanes of the summer, and then the earthquake in Pakistan. In the context of such natural mayhem and intense human suffering, a painting like Ma ema e is interesting because it asserts the suchness of destruction in nature- it depicts both an astonishingly enormous force of chaos, and an unblemished stillness. Time is counted in aeons; no one is around to get hurt as these landscapes are scoured, molded, and eventually renewed.

As I finish writing this, the apartment building two doors down from where I live stands charred & part-gutted from a huge fire on the 27th of January. I was at work during the smoke and the flames & so my experience of this event has been all aftermath and no spectacle; all mud and lost-kitty signs; all suchness, and yet no beauty.

I look again at Jay's paintings, and I see utopian disasters: vast experiments in the interaction of elemental forces, where the viewer is always safe, and no one ends up homeless in pyjamas on the sidewalk.