The images we’ve seen on these pages reveal what we bring to them. They invite us in by portraying something that is not quite real with familiar forms and textures arranged in an unfamiliar context and then they play a game of discovery with us. In a surrealistic way they act as a Rorschach test that edits our understanding of reality.

How did primitive civilizations, the Maya, Aztecs, the Northwest Indian tribes and others arrive at the wonderfully fantastic, yet grounded in reality, art forms for the gods and spirits that ornamented so much of their sculpture and architecture? Over the years the sculpture and painting we’ve done at the studio, clydelynds.com, has owed much to those early civilizations. It has always been a primary interest to find sources, perhaps similar to theirs, that spur imagination.

The Totem series began with an accidental observation. About twenty years ago, while canoeing in quiet water at dusk, I noticed reflections of the shoreline that, if turned ninety degrees, resembled faces, part human, part beast. It was an opportune discovery as I considered that perhaps the reflections of stone and forest informed the art of those prior civilizations. More importantly, I had unearthed something uniquely fascinating in its own right.

The title of the series, Totem, refers to the idea that the faces we see in many of these images seem to be emblematic of the human condition. Do we see kindness, wisdom, fear, anger? Do we see the faces of evil, of menace? Beauty, beast, queens and clowns? Yes, they are all there but their attributes are our own perceptions because these images are in reality neutral – abstract forms with not much more than something that vaguely resembles a pair of eyes, sometimes a nose and perhaps a mouth. We can’t help ourselves as we assemble faces from the symmetries imposed on nature. And, like the totem poles of the Northwest tribes, each image has more than one face – at least the elements that our eye discerns as face-like. Each time we look, another creature hidden in the matrix of stone and leaf seems to reveal itself.

New portfolios are in progress for this series and portfolios that replace natural forms with the forms and textures found in urban settings are also being explored.