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Glass

Inverses series

This is an attempt to capture some abstract relationships - inverses, meta-structure, recursion, and the like. The viewer is encouraged to imagine the drawings without any circles, and then without any round aspects.

This series was inspired by an article in The Economist about "grapheme-colour synaesthesia," which is a tendency to see letters and numbers in color. It's also inspired by a story I heard on NPR about Daniel Tammet - who suffers from Asperger's syndrome - where he says that he finds it easy to remember numbers because they have deep and complex associations, like 17 is sort of a dark, tangled landscape with clouds and mysterious holes in the ground.

This theme interests me because it gets to the heart of representation and communcation. Information can't be "re"presented unless it's moved to a new context or into a new sensory realm. Stories don't really consist of ink on a page or letters, and math isn't a combination of symbols on a flat surface. Why do we make shapes on paper when the truth of any abstraction is in its implementation through action?

These drawings are from my sketchbook while I was touring Europe. My camera was stolen, so I just drew everything I would have otherwised photographed.

		While in the Mucha Museum in Prague, I thought, what would happen if I used the style of Art Noveau to depict surrealism. The figure here comes from a work by Edward Brauner.
		Tyn Church in Prague - didn't fit on the page, so I continued from the bottom.

Painting

These drawings are from my sketchbook while I was touring Europe. My camera was stolen, so I just drew everything I would have otherwised photographed.

		A painting I made on a friend's door. Free is cheaper than canvas. Dali's eye watches over my own surrealistic landscape, with Christo umbrellas along the cliff.
		I like to play around with acrylics sometimes just to be sure I haven't completely forgotten how to do it. When I was living in the mountains in rural Arkansas, I saw this image when I was looking at the stars and tried to imagine what it must've been like on the first day, when God created light.
		This is the first piece in an exploration of the idea that scale is an illusion - when we look down into the submicroscopic realm we see the same as when we look out at astronomical distances.
		I wanted to make a more finished piece on the above Mucha/Brauner theme. This is the first time I had worked with watercolors since I played with them in high school, and I only show it to compare with the next one.
		I wasn't satisfied with the above watercolor, so I made this one before putting up the paints for another few years. Not that it's a masterpiece, but I think it shows how quickly I learn a new medium.