Mysticism runs through David Vincent’s veins like blood.

To wander through the artist’s new exhibit is to be immersed in his dreams, visions and spiritual experiences.

“Heart Speak,” his new show of abstract paintings, will hang at the Manitou Art Center in Manitou Springs through Aug. 29. His abstracts have been shown at Surface Gallery, Raitman Art Galleries in Vail, and in a solo show at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College.

“In spiritual traditions, it says that everything resonates from the heart,” said the longtime Manitou artist. “Some of my art is about spiritual downloads, and I am starting to see a pattern where the work is somehow capturing future events. In my experience, there is only one truth, and this one truth is this unexplainable, all-encompassing eternal love that everything is birthed from.”

The 15 new pieces veer from his usual representational paintings of wildlife, cityscapes and landscapes, done with unexpected slashes of color that thrum with vitality and movement. In 2015, one of those paintings, a vibrant depiction of a pack of cyclists racing toward the viewer, won a poster contest for Colorado’s USA Pro Challenge. That big win led to a career surge as his works were accepted into galleries in Breckenridge, Vail, Santa Fe, N.M., and Park City, Utah.

His representational works go by his full name, David Vincent Gonzales, while he uses the shortened version of his name for the abstracts.

Maybe it’s no surprise, after viewing his new work, that a conversation with the artist means stepping out of the mundane and into the unknown.

His life and art are a tapestry of the metaphysical interwoven with the minutiae of daily life. In one moment, he tells you about his job as a chain saw artist in Manitou, carving bears out of wood or the murals he and his wife, also an artist, did of aspens inside Goodwill Retail Centers in Colorado Springs years ago.

And in the next, he is telling you about the unexplainable feeling of bliss and union with the universe he experienced after reliving a traumatic childhood story during a Landmark Forum, a personal development course, in Denver.

Life has been like this for Vincent, with regular jobs, like waiting tables at the old Stagecoach Inn in Manitou, interspersed with the mystical, like his first experience receiving reiki, an energy healing modality, during which he had a vision so compelling that he went on to learn and practice the alternative treatment for others.

Reiki led him into a world of doing psychic readings and soul portraits at metaphysical fairs, where he sketched people and the otherworldly beings he saw around them and then to courses in Transcendental Meditation and Inner Engineering by Sadhguru.

And all of it has brought him to this moment, where an inner tug has elicited this new style of arresting and intuitive shapes and colors.

“It’s a brilliant example of abstract art, especially when it comes to the use of color. It’s exuberant,” said LuDell Walter, a gallery consultant at the MAC. “It’s really intuitive. He’ll start with a mark or a brush stroke and build on that. From all his years of doing art, he has a body memory of composition and use of color. They’re really tight.”

Vincent has been an artist from early on, spending the better part of his formative years in Santa Fe, where he spent hours drawing and working on his art. He began exhibiting his work at 12, including at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Governor’s Mansion in Santa Fe. At 17, he received the New Mexico Governor’s Award.

After high school, he studied at the San Antonio Art Institute and the Kansas City Art Institute, where his works made it into shows alongside Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Walt Disney. Eventually, he graduated from the University of Southern Colorado in Pueblo before moving to Manitou in the late 1990s.

Listening to him describe his new work feels like he’s attempting to unravel a mystery that will never have an answer. The imagery in his paintings somehow comes to him from a different time, he believes, as he talks about timelines and the idea of the past, present and future all happening simultaneously.

“It feels as though these works take on a life of their own,” he said. “It is as if the unseen information in the air finds itself woven onto the canvas.”

Take his piece “Infusion.” The upper half the canvas is painted black. The lower half white. Three or four months after painting it, he was hiking through a canyon and found an oddly colored rock; its top half dark, its bottom half light.

“When I pick it up, I immediately think about this painting,” he said. “I look at the rock and say I painted you.”

He points out another of his pieces, which contains what looks like a shark fin. Instead of covering it up, as he often does, he left it. Two days later, as he walked through Manitou late at night, he came upon a man passed out cold on the sidewalk, curled up like a mollusk. On the back of his hoodie were big, block letters that spelled out sharx.

“For some reason, I felt that it was important to keep it (the shark fin),” Vincent said. “My observation is that while I’m creating these paintings, I’m pulling in certain timelines intuitively. With my representational work, I have a road map. With the abstractions, there is no map, just a response to the unseen and following my gut.”

This way of painting has become another way of tapping into the mysticism that seems to envelop him.

“I’ll be painting the blue, green and red and then go out riding my bike and suddenly come across these color combinations, and I’ll say I just painted that,” he said. “The other day, I looked in the sky and saw the clouds cropped the moon in such a way that it looked like a triangle. I immediately thought about this triangular pattern at the top of my painting that resembled the same shape of the moon. Something is happening with the marks and shapes of my work that is reflecting future episodes of time.”

Details

“Heart Speak,” works by David Vincent (aka David Vincent Gonzales), through Aug. 29, Manitou Art Center, 513 Manitou Ave., Manitou Springs, free; davidvincentart.com, manitouartcenter.org

Something else: Artist talk with Vincent, 5:30-7 p.m. Aug. 27, Manitou Art Center, free