My paintings celebrate the beauty and power of nature, and the interconnectedness of all that exists. I’m as inspired by trees, animals, rocks, and flowers, as by nature’s ability to continually remix everything in cycles of growth, change, decay, and renewal.
My current works are videos (moving paintings) which represent similarities between micro and macro particle dynamics, and their resemblances to life processes such as neurobiology, dreaming, and self assembly.
The videos introduce visualized original theories about black holes, quark production, pulsars, and other cosmic phenomena, and portray the cosmos as an entangled web of large and small energy/mass systems, comprising and enveloping each other.
Slideshow:
During a shamanic journey guided by Raif (Zephyr) Greco, reiki master and drummer extraordinaire, this octopus taught and guided me as we danced in the sea. When people are stressed and depressed about their jobs, home lives and general lack of freedom and leisure, they can sometimes seem to be living partial deaths. Future beings could evolve into more humane societies that foster joy, meaningful contribution, arts, and personal development. Mike reentered his math class to find that during his absence the other students and teacher had decorated the classroom with pictures of the white bird, which had long disturbed him. Here’s a vision I saw once inside my eyelids. We’re sentient beings; to nurture our sentience is an important part of life. A fleeting vision In a dream, the world had become so crowded that many people had no space in which to move around. When the tide went out they moved about on the beach, going about their business, enjoying that part of their lives. When the tide came in they moved uphill, back into the town, and again there was standing room only. In a lucid dream this tree fern was modeling for me, changing poses with its fronds by my telepathic cue, while I memorized the poses to paint later. I cued the treefern to change its fronds into feathers. It began to do so, but just then some people entered the scene and the tree fern, protective of its magical powers, ceased its frond-to-feather mutation. On a road in a dream I came upon this scene while escaping through the woods from a prison camp. Uphill among the trees women worked in sweatshops; downhill was the prison. In a dream, my landlord and I walked through these ruins looking for a comfortable place to sit and visit. After hours of insomnia, while transitioning into REM sleep, part of my mind was still conscious, as another part was beginning to dream, so I watched hypnagogic images coalescing from flashes of light and colorful swirls, changing into representational forms, and dissipating back into colors and swirls. The ability to see objects’ properties independently of their surroundings, such as recognizing parallel lines among a series of near-parallel lines, may be a function of the corpus callosum. This painting hung on a gallery wall in a dream. It had won a prize – seventeen dollars. The caretaker of a saltwater(?) aquarium was refilling the tank and forgot, or didn’t care, that he had already added (salt) to the water, and added some more. The fish, sensing that they were now poisoned and doomed, began to indiscriminately eat each other whole. Some were eating fish so large that they died in the process. I reached in and poked the back of a large pudgy fish, so it regurgitated another fish it had nearly swallowed. One small fish was hiding in a crevice under a rock, knowing it would soon die of contaminated water, or be eaten. I added fresh water to the tank to dilute the poison, though probably too late. I don’t remember the rest of the dream, just this hypnopompic image right before waking up. In this dream the water was amazingly clear. Perhaps the big bang was preceded by a long quantumesque, pre-cosmic gestation. Self assembly exists seemingly everywhere, from dust bunnies to molecules to solar systems. Life also seems to occur just about anywhere conditions permit. At some (observer dependent) phase, vibrations are perceived as mass. With enough pressure, a thing can pop out the other side, become a different sort of material, or attain different qualities. A painting by Telmo Leon was the basis for the crucible in this painting. A view from the Skyway between Chico and Paradise, California. This Bolivian road is said to be the most dangerous in south America due to its sheer drop and frequently muddy conditions. For many it’s the most beautiful road they’ve ever seen. He killed her, then died because there was no one to take care of him. Everything must eventually become something else. As life ends in death, so does death bring new life. A Bolivian museum mummy passes Coroico-inspired misty hills and a hogan by Lake Titicaca. In many cultures, the deceaseds’ spirit is believed to depart toward the setting sun, so the door of a tomb is often located at the west. I made the sketch for this painting in the dark outside of Cusco, Peru. This painting was inspired by a scene in Luis Bunuel’s film of the same name. A loosew departure from Antonio (Canaletto) Canale’s original painting. As sea levels rose, amphibians were among the first to perish en masse. To find one’s essence, one must integrate harmoniously with the people and environment by which one is surrounded. During a thunderstorm, rain fell so hard onto touchably close banana leaves outside the open window, that large raindrops bounced into the room almost horizontally. Some people will play chess for hours. A Laotian river flows through caves and tunnels underneath a mountain to the other side. A painting by Telmo Leon inspired the vase in this scene. An injury to anyone taints the injurer. Creativity and imagination generally occur in the right side of the brain, which controls the left side of the body. Artist, poets, dreamers and other right-brain-dominant people can easily feel stranded and unsupported in our left-brain-dominant culture. This painting is dedicated to Mumia Abu Jamal. It’s featured in Long Distance Revolutionary, by Street Legal Cinema. Groups who traditionally rival each other sometimes unite to protect themselves from a common oppressor. In this nurturing and dangerous world, accidents of birth, resources, geology, climate, and other factors determine whether we flourish or wither, live or die. Our aqueous bodies respond to exterior forces, such as the moon’s pull, and electrical currents. When we lead diverse lives, attending to different inputs and energies, we lose vibrational community. Though we share physical space, our humours diverge. Echoes – Communion Mass consists of webs of vibrations, with smaller particles enveloped by larger particles, each layer providing an energetic substrate for the next larger layer. The wave nature of matter is perceived differently by observers of different scale and sensory apparatus. In a dream a hole had been cut into the ceiling of my studio – a grave that opened to the outside, as if I were underground. Friends and family dropped earth and flowers into the grave, not seeming to notice my studio below. Cosmic elements are full of complex, convoluted math. Particles implode and explode, then through dust they find their way back to replicas of their former selves. The cosmos may be rife with life. Liquid water, nitrogen, and other fluids provide environments in which life is likely to arise. When a seafaring molecule is suddenly ripped apart by a great force, such as that present in a bursting bubble, an opportunity arises for the newly exposed molecular fragments and ‘tails’ to rebuild and repair themselves. At such a moment of restructuring, a mutation may have occurred which led to more complex molecular units becoming life or providing a basis for life. Dr. Bernard Yurke theorizes that just such an occurrence may have beget life on Earth.
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