Show your shadow Janus face
There’s always the background, which I think about as a kind of roiling atmospheric firmament, formless and void, darkness over the face of the deep. It presents like the residue of a random natural process, free of much intent beyond activating the surface. (When I was studying printmaking in the 90s, I would turn copper plates face down and frisbee them across the parking lot behind the art building at CSU, trying for the same type of thing.)
The background is always overlaid with a curvilinear figure that functions like a non-Euclidean coordinate system, rationalizing the unstructured fluidity underlying it. Each loop is like a little apothecary bottle, backlit to cloudy or shimmering effect. I think of the relation between the background and the looping form like the difference between the actual, on the one hand, and the available means we have for experiencing, processing, and recalling the actual, on the other. They are as similar and as different as are a landscape and the map describing it.
This is the case in relation to scale as well. In the background, the gradients are subtle and the textural details indicative of distance and space, while the loop iterations are stacked close, appearing time-lapsed, hovering fractions of an inch above a flat surface. So the painting feels both flat and vast, depending on whether you focus on the line or direct your attention through to the underlying complexity that line fails to adequately convey. Note though that in failing, repeatedly, it becomes its own remarkable thing.