The founding four ascend
The founding four's ascent, earth to sky: across Prophecy, Transition, Four Nations, and Four Corners -- made sequentially from one shared starting point following the Global Peace Walk 2000 -- the artist's implied vantage climbs painting by painting: level with a rooted, growing city-tree (Prophecy); ascending alongside a composite tower (Transition); elevated but tethered, standing on a real bridge overlooking real towers (Four Nations); and finally untethered entirely, standing on unstable, finite ground beneath a fully invented cosmic sky (Four Corners). This tracks a parallel handover from photograph to paint across the same four works, and connects backward to an earlier, unexplained seed of the same intimate/elevated duality in Self Portrait 1995 (1995), and to the vortex-sky-over-small-world lineage of The Thinker and Antiquity (1993/1996) -- as well as to Antiquity's 'unfinished as resolved' device, echoed in Four Corners by the kept, uncorrected accidental water drip running through the painted sky. Prophecy's own numeric echo of four was clarified in this session: not absent, as previously thought, but structurally embedded as three pairs plus a fourth (tree and small building) in the painting's row of diminishing forms, drawn from the Hopi prophecy cave painting as orally told to the artist on the Peace Walk -- a full cycle of growth, disappearance, and return, not a one-way ascent.