"Chasing the Dream Through Shifting Planes"
In "Chasing the Dream Through Shifting Planes", a familiar pedestrian-crossing figure moves through a fragmented world of shifting color and form, reaching toward a dove that seems always just beyond its grasp. Two larger, abstracted doves emerge quietly in the foreground, blurring the boundary between what is being pursued and what may already be present.
For Heatwole, the imagery also carries an intimate autobiographical meaning. The distant dove represents a pursuit of the Holy Spirit—a spiritual search that unexpectedly became intertwined with another journey: finding the woman who would become his bride. The two abstract doves in the foreground symbolize the love and union of two people, suggesting that sometimes in pursuing one thing, we are unknowingly being led toward another.
The painting grew from Heatwole’s continuing exploration of perception, symbolism, coincidence, and the unseen connections that seem to weave themselves through our lives. Its constantly shifting planes suggest a world that is never quite as fixed or understandable as it first appears—a landscape through which we search for direction, meaning, love, and something beyond ourselves.
But this painting also marks a deeply significant moment in the artist’s own journey. While creating it, Heatwole encountered an extraordinary series of connections that fundamentally changed the way he understood certain events in his life and, ultimately, the world around him. That discovery remains largely outside the painting’s explanation.
Perhaps that is where it belongs.
The figure continues its pursuit. The dove remains ahead. Two others have appeared along the way. And somewhere among the shifting planes lies a mystery the artist believes he stumbled upon rather than invented.
The painting does not ask the viewer to accept an answer. It simply asks whether everything we call coincidence is necessarily coincidental.
