Intermingle 20260415 36 × 48” acrylic on canvas $987
The organizing figure is a trefoil without any of the over/under data that would be relevant to knot theory. I’m keeping things strictly planar, with the caveat that direct experience of true two-dimensionality is wholly inaccessible to us. Each trefoil instance has an inner aspect gravitating towards symmetry, and an outer aspect warped to the available space, pushing and pulling in response to the presence of others. Each compartment is a shallow alcove of lantern glow, a translucence. Molecules, plankton, fingerprints, hieroglyphs. Also, stunned monkey faces.
Adventures in Isotopy
This series runs in parallel with and complements the Primitives series. Wherein that one catalogs (among other things) the distinct individual forms that emerge when adding incremental complexity to simple circle immersions, this series looks at how a multiplicity of those figures, along with their simpler progenitors, might fill an ambient space, how each is altered by the proximity of the others, how the more varied the elements, the more they resemble something like an ecosystem.
I have a hunch that the complex patterns we associate with consciousness and feeling, values like inside/outside, liberty/duty, approach/withdrawal, individual/collective, peace/conflict, order/chaos, desire/disgust, meaning/hopelessness, all these and more derive directly from and are traceable back to the first physical morphologies that inevitably arose in the advent of something proceeding from nothing. These figures feel like first things, antecedents to river stones, organisms, alphabets, number systems. They resonate with something basic, ancient, fundamental, pre-primal. They are cave paintings in the quantum age.
Bottom line, the felt experience of living in a world that behaves in ways that are described by mathematics with an uncanny preternatural accuracy is astonishing, an always available source of joy.
Brace for impact 20260407 36 × 48” acrylic on canvas $987
The predominant figure here is a simple circle immersion where the interior loops are fully nested. There are also examples where the interior loops are adjacent, and simpler forms. The larger figures look like they are hovering off a screen being hit by harsh projected light. But also like they are floating in some viscous suspension, lymphocytes, a cytokine flurry. Up close, there is a lot of surprising color stuff peeking past the edges.
Overlap the magisteria 20260404 36 × 48” acrylic on canvas $987
The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould contended that Science and Religion constituted non-overlapping magisteria. He asserted that the contentions of each were wholly inaccessible to the tools and methods of the other. And I agree with that. Nonetheless, I suspect that the things we believe derive in no small part from the underlying physical structures of our shared reality. Dualities are observable, and also serve as organizing principles in most spiritual systems. This doesn’t seem like two completely unrelated things.
The background in this painting is continuous and coherent. The foreground figures both acknowledge and diverge from the underlying structure, a new settlement built on the ruins of an older city. Simple circle immersions with two intersections where the inner loops are adjacent rather than further nested, drifting cirrus above a darker and grander landscape. Are they unrelated?
Turn over a new rock 20260402 36 × 36” acrylic on canvas $610
Smooth edges like rivers stones, except fashioned by opposite means, warped from a higher symmetry as a consequence of crowding in a finite space rather than starting as jagged edges rounded off by erosion. “Starting” would be wrong. Beginnings happen largely in curves and spirals, endings in polygons. A mud flat, deposited by swirling currents and eddies, cracks into polygons as it dries. Rocks cooled from magma crumble in chunks. Crystals form as energy dissipates. Creation is curved, destruction angular. I’ll remind you that we live in boxes.
Try to not see faces 20260401 36 × 60” acrylic on canvas $1,597
Since I started painting single loops more than a decade ago, I never felt like I had a compelling reason to include more than one. Then I started the “Primitives” series, collecting simple circle immersions and classifying them from sort of a phylogenetic perspective. And I thought, what might happen if I were to take a single variety and populate a finite space with it? So I did. And three things happened. First, containment. Wheels within wheels. Second, a new dynamic in the monotonal curves that look like what happens when bending a wire coat hanger. Shallow curves taking sudden acute turns. Fills the space better. Third, faces. And once you see them, even the ones that don’t look like faces become faces, insectoid, alien, otherworldly. Wheels within wheels, all covered with eyes.
If you’re here, you’ve reached the beginning of the series, and presumably seen how each of these is an incremental step on a trajectory toward a complexity that retains something like homeostasis even as it increases. I’m not woo woo enough to ascribe intent to any of it, but the most beautiful things the universe does involve devising systems of great complexity that manage to sustain themselves for a time. My daily practice is an embodiment of this perspective.