"Everything is True" Artist Reception: Raven's Wing Magical Co. March 2nd 6:30-8:00

Please stop by and say hello at my artist reception March 2nd 6:30-8:00 at Raven’s Wing Magical Company.  The paintings are up now if you want to take a look.  

Hope to see you there!


If you're interested in buying, prices are reduced from the ones appearing on this site.  Click here to see price list.  Or you can get in touch with the shop or with me through FB Messenger.




The Raven's Wing Magical Co.
536 Grand Ave, Oakland, CA
(510) 444-9355
Sun-Fri. 12-8pm, Sat. 11am-8pm

Everything Is True

paintings by Brian Strang

“Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet."
― W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

I paint to discover the world, to see the world as it exists and to imagine it as it might exist.  I look and listen within and without, to what is possible and impossible, and follow where my imagination goes.  But my imagination, like everyone’s, is part of a collective unconscious, an expanding universe of dreams, full of universal archetypes floating through the ages.

Everywhere is the center of the world. The universal unconscious is the chant of nature and it is the native speech of dreams: images, archetypes, forms within ourselves, shaped by the world and part of it.  Everyone is a part, nobody apart. What we think is new is timeless. Nothing is new. Myth is a language of symbols, as alive and flowing through the interconnected blood of the past, present and future, outside of time.  Look closely at the kingdom within you and you will find it is the same as the kingdom everywhere.

Poetry—linguistic rhythms encoded in the world—is everywhere and is read through the lens of imagination.  When we read these symbols, we read ourselves, where in the speech of dreams, we become timeless, simultaneous, beyond belief.  We are made of eternity: matter made of waves, stories made of symbols, retold again and again, a never-ending flow of interwoven meanings, inseparable from their sources. The images and rhythms of the collective unconscious are an eternally recurring symbolic language: a literature that extends beyond the possible, beyond imaginable.  I read the world through its poetry and its language of symbols.

B.

About Brian Strang’s painting, the SF Bay Guardian has said, “Strang’s work... suggests a more romantic pleasure in and response to visual phenomena.  It betrays a rhythmic sensibility not unlike that found in a sketch by Matisse” (6/13/07).

His paintings, which all contain written poetic text, have been exhibited many times over the last ten years in solo and group shows, have been republished in magazines and currently reside in many private collections.  He has lived in East Oakland for fifteen years, teaches English at San Francisco State University, has had several books of poetry published, most recently Dark Adapt by Duration Press, and plays guitar in Crow Crash Radio.