Superposition
This series is preoccupied with attempting to envision all of the potential immediate futures for a given form based on adding the smallest possible increment of additional complexity. Things get weird quick. For instance, Just adding a single loop to a simple circle results in a set of distinct topologies that is not finite. Look at “Hold Still” below and you can see for yourself.
I started doing these as part of figuring out if I can come up with a notation schema for the primal geometric forms I call “Primitives”, something like sheet music, that would allow a fluent third party to reconstruct any given one, and that could help in extrapolating what will happen downstream in the combinatoric explosion that results from their evolving with each step up in the total number of intersections. Still working on the notation schema, but it is a hard problem.
That’s the concrete part of it anyway. The other part has to do with what it feels like to be sitting in the moment before the standing wave of all the potential outcomes that could result from a given context collapse into the one thing that ends up happening. It is a fraught and thrilling place to find yourself. You leave a job without another one. You are about to choose or change a major. You’re in a new place with new people. You lose faith, or you feel its early stirrings. A relationship ends. A loved one dies. You are standing before a blank canvas.
Next time, and there will be many next times coming, don’t rush it. Don’t hasten the collapse into the real to flee the discomfort of the uncertain. Linger. Breath. Add some bath salts. Light a candle.
Hold Still 20260702 36 × 48” acrylic on canvas $610
Adding a loop to a simple circle can be done in three ways. The loop can be wholly contained (lilac), wholly external (lavender), or intersecting with the circle (blue, along with the rest). In the latter case, the loop and the circle can be braided infinitely, with the number of intersections extending to encompass all odd integers equal to or great than 3, and without violating the monotonal curvature constraint that keeps complexity from careening off the rails. Even with that constraint, and the further constraint of only allowing for simple traversal intersections, the infinite rears its many heads immediately, and once it arrives, it stays.
Break the shell from the inside (redux) 20260702 36 × 48” acrylic on canvas $610
This is the first in the "Superposition" series. It accounts for all potential simplest increment transformations (including no change) of a 2D trefoil through the next three generations of progressing complexity, which is here defined as adding one to the total number of intersections. Quantum possibilities, overlayed and intertwined, rendered directly through dead reckoning, with no recourse to tools or measures outside of brushes and the colored mud we call paint.
That I can just freehand this attests to how the practice materially changes the brain, the sensory apparatus, the faculties of perception. That’s the point. The painting itself is ancillary.