Origins of Life

I worked on this series of sculptural paintings while living in the small town of Caceres, Spain between 1993 and 1995. There, the cragged, almost desert-like landscape coalesced with my own feelings of detachment as an expatriate to produce the motivations for this tough, evocative series.

Painting on found and treated wood, I created a series of works referential to the land in which I was living, while touching on themes of beauty and entropy -- and the way in which they come together to create the human experience. Delicate colors, lines and organic shapes overlaid on the rough, broken surfaces of the wood create a metaphor for the tension between the entropy of our physical world and the eternity of our spiritual existence, overlaid itself upon the banalities of a mundane reality.

I am ultimately referencing the first moments of universal existence, when the potential for entropy, or breakdown, and the potential for spiritual growth were threaded together into the whole energy of the birthing universe. In a general sense, the wood does stand for this entropy and the image laid overtop alludes to the spiritual life that takes place herein.

The works provide images to be pondered, not deciphered, and propose a kind of road map into this unfathomable time of universal history, when all was potential and the line between chaos and order had not yet been established.