Prints of this stunning painting are available in 3 sizes. Archival paper prints have a print surface of 20" x 14" ($130). Standard format canvas prints are a limited edition, signed and numbered print series with a total production run of 750. Print surface is 30" tall by 20" wide ($475). The ultimate collector will need the Grand Format signed and numbered print! This room dominating canvas print measures 60" tall by 40" wide ($1350). Only 300 of these will ever be printed! The prints arrive in a standard USPS shipping tube. Please allow 10 business days from receipt of payment for shipping within the continental US. The purchaser is responsible for all matting and framing.
"You use color in an emotionally evocative way, you create believable atmosphere. When I visited those trees in real life it was as if you had already taken me there in your painting. Powerful!" Larry, N
"Your paintings are about time. The more I look at them, the more they pull me in to tell me there story. The I understand this, the more I see their story is really my story, OUR story!" Pat P
Check out my YouTube video on this painting!
I grew up during the 70’s & 80’s in a very religious Midwestern household. Every Sunday morning for nearly 20 years the pastor stood in front of us and told us who God was, and what HE wanted from and for us. The pastor told us of the rewards we would experience if we “believed & behaved” and what awaited us if we didn’t. “It’s true because we say it’s true!” has always been The Red Flag.
However, a string of profound early childhood experiences left me with a belief in A Divine Force. In my 20’s I set out to strip away all dogmatic ideologies. That process began with three questions: What is Divinity? Who are we? and What is our relationship to that which is greater than us?
To begin to understand divinity, I went back to the 3 year old me who had his first moment of self-awareness while experiencing the fierce beauty of explosive light and color of the setting sun. The Sun has a diameter of about 865,000 miles. 1.3 million Earths could fit inside it. The Sun accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of our Solar System. This was what I have come to understand as The Always.
About a decade into my search I came across the Bristlecone Pine tree. This species lives at high elevations in western North America mountain ranges and are the oldest known living organisms on the planet. The Bristlecone are slow-growing and consume around 600 gallons of water annually. The oldest known specimen is named Methuselah. Methuselah is more than 5,000 years old!
How we measure time has everything to do with the relationship of the Earth to the Sun. It has been blazing the perfect amount of life giving light, energy and warmth every moment since the beginning of our solar system some 4.5 billion years ago. Humans have only existed for the past 75,000 years. Those 75 millennia equate to 0.0017% of the time our solar system has existed. The odds of intelligent life forming is 1 in 60 billion (1/60,000,000,000). The odds of you existing are 1 in 4 quadrillion (1/4,000,000,000,000,000).
The result of considering “Who are we?” and “How do we relate to that which is greater than us?” through the trifecta of the massiveness of scale, immensity of time and an impossibility of odds brought me to my knees before what I have come to understand as the Grace of the Divine.
This journey culminated in the painting Ancient & Always.
Earle Rock
“I work to rid me of them
And them of me.”
