R55 Originator

R55 Originator

36 x 48" oil on panel

private collection (sold)

Each section of the big spiral contains a growth fractal of some sort, all freely drawn.  There are snails reverting to binary code, and eggs breaking down into bytes, and plants growing into snail shapes, and worms that always turn.  It is much more amusing than ominous, and more whimsical than instructive.

It is so big...yet my work seems to devour the space.  I could do a much bigger one.  The painting that never ends.

Painting in this way, a little piece at a time, a little design or creature composed on the spot each day, is like writing in a journal.  It reminds me of the musing remembrances of the Proust novels, the same feeling of endless reflection, of turning the same motifs over and over, viewing them each time in a slightly different light.  Every motif becomes familiar, a friend, a coded language, a tapestry that begins in the middle and keeps expanding, and is never meant to be finished. 

If only the work need not be in 'convenient' pieces.  If only there were some endless wall to hang it on, no need to break it up and scatter it all over.  It is like losing pieces of your life, sending painted panels here and there, never seeing them again.  How can you be a complete artist, when you are always beginning over again?  Real art, surely, must be built up, one idea on another, like a coral reef, so that the artist at the end of his life, at the end of his work, can look at a whole and see his progression.  Then perhaps something could be said of it, or some greater pattern emerge.