In this mysterious piece, entitled Lost Journey, Mulleian presents an image of the evanescent permanence in humanity’s endeavor to reach for something higher, the challenging, a priori aspect of vulnerability inherent in any intuitively inspired vision. Is the artist’s view of man’s inspiration to voyage into the unknown informed by the same cosmic force that compels our small planet on its voyage around our sun? Is it possible that we are going around in circles on a journey without a destination? If so, why, and what is the nature of the paradoxical force compelling it? In this painting the artist seems to pose this question lying at the heart of mans quest for unattainable knowledge, driven by a thirst to know the unknowable. Is destiny influenced by some force? If so, the artist has given this mysterious force a face that only the eyes of faith can see.

In an earlier work entitled The Moccasins, reflections on mortality and impermanence propel Mulleian’s dialogue with the world. In that work, out of a gently undulating sea of sand emerge a pair of worn and weathered moccasins the color of burnished gold. This motif is echoed here, in Lost Journey, where the sea is the undulating prairie and the vessel is the wagon, the prairie schooner. In both works, the question soon arises as to what has become of the humans who inhabited these forms. There is a suggestion in both that the answer to such a question, in the end, is of relative or secondary value.

Underlying all is a belief that humanity is but a conscious witness to the greater forces of time and nature, a temporary participant, for better or worse, in a greater pattern. There seems to be a graceful reminder here that man, and ultimately nature too, will greatly benefit by our becoming conscious of, and honoring, the need to understand the balance in this relationship. Is this perhaps the hidden secret held within the trunk in the painting, Lost Journey?

Lost Journey

The sound of thunder from a restless storm
finds calm in the stillness of a virgin sky.
Unseen forces bring alive old relics upon a prairie
that holds secret tales in a trunk.
Sealed forever is the story of a lost journey
that still rides across foreboding horizons
led by undying promises gilded in gold
from a setting sun.