“Astride the Whisper of Chaos”

Drawing upon a Platonic sense of the Erotic as a striving toward the Infinite, this series connects the development of the human form to a relentless desire to explore and traverse the unfolding Universe. Humanity rides on that first turbulent breath flowing out from the birth of the Cosmos. The elements of our bodies share the same origin and have moved from ancient gas clouds through the creation and destruction of stars to land eventually in the stream of life. The arresting beauty of our bodily forms and the possibility of the Erotic are, in this way, subtracted from nebulae now lost in the depths of space and time.

“Astride the Whisper of Chaos” is a series that begins as all my work does, with the free flow of watercolor pigment across a polypropylene surface. A technical milestone is marked for me here, though, with the subtraction of the human figure from the abstraction that usually serves as the completed form of my work. There is no deviation, however, from my drive to integrate process, product, and content with a focus on beauty as a bridge between substance and audience.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of my heroes, expresses the poetry at the heart of “Astride the Whisper of Chaos:”

(A very special thanks to Max Schlickenmeyer for putting together that amazing video.)