“If there is a ‘story’ that my work is telling, it’s a an open-ended, universal one,” says Christopher Reiger, an artist and writer currently living and working in New York City.

To learn more about Christopher Reiger’s work, read Phil Barcio’s blog post and explore the artist’s website, as well as his blog, Hungry Hyaena.

The artist writes:

As a child, I was enamored of an enchanted, fantastic Nature. By my mid-teens, however, I’d abandoned this Wonderland approach in favor of “hard” science. This evolution from enchantment to analysis parallels the history of modern science, the transition out of the Dark Ages, a time of faith, magic, and superstition, into the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

But our contemporary world is lettering a little bit of the magic and the myth seep back in. I reacted against this trend initially, but now I embrace as many fantastic beliefs as I do hard facts. This conscious, irrational choice is central to my work. I’m a sucker for the transcendentalism of Emerson or Whitman and, at root, my cosmology is panentheistic, like theirs.

There’s a John Ruskin quote that I always defer to. He describes the “broken harmonies of fact and fancy, thought and feeling, truth and faith.” In my painting, I’m trying to bridge that divide. The beautiful thing about Ruskin’s quote is that it so neatly and poetically describes not just my own search for balance and integrity, but also the contemporary, global dilemma as we move from a period of illusory certitude and universal truth into the labyrinth of post-modern relativism and heightened cultural and religious tension.

How does painting or drawings deal with these issues? I believe that every individual thing is integrated into what I term The Everything. I’m Nature, you’re Nature, a meteoroid in the asteroid belt is Nature, the keyboard I’m typing on is Nature; I find spirit in this interconnectivity. Given the increasing division of contemporary life and work, as well as our seeming need for “busyness,” it’s easy to overlook the integral whole, but I try to remind myself regularly what a miraculous experience we’re a part of. Painting is, in essence, part of that humbling meditation. It’s at once annihilative and aggrandizing. Looking at art with an open mind and heart is no different.

Originally from rural Virginia, Christopher Reiger attended the College of William and Mary (B.A. Studio Arts, 1999) in Williamsburg, Virginia, before moving north to New York. Since graduating from the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in 2002, he has participated in many solo and group exhibitions. Additional work can be seen at his website, and essays on art, ecology, natural history, philosophy, and theology can be read at Hungry Hyaena, the artist’s blog.