Origins of Life 1993-1995

I worked on this series of sculptural paintings while living in the small town of Caceres, Spain between 1992 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 on top of 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. These pieces ultimately reference 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.

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.