There's something about a circle that can be both peaceful yet tumultuous, contained yet released, energetic yet still.

My favorite course - ever - of the 50,000 I took, was Geometry. And whatever it was that resonated with me about Euclid's conceptualization is resurfacing with my painting. It offers a place to rest. And sometimes it seems to be the solution to stabilizing a piece that's really complex or that's unsettling in some fashion.

In 1970 I read a book (recommended by the Whole Earth Catalog) called Laws of Form. The first page has haunted me ever since - it was an injunction: "Draw a distinction." It's a profound concept. Among other things, it provides a construct for making something from nothing. That is, where there was homogeneity there is now difference; a this vs a that; one side vs another. Drawing the Distinction is the essence of creativity. So, these pieces draw distinctions in varying forms, exploring the idea in colors and shapes.

Dreams of Ru(i)n(e)s – It took me a while to comprehend what I was reaching for in this series. The collection title is a conflation; that is, the merging of two lines of thought or sets of information into one thread: Ruins and Runes.

With respect to that concept merging, a couple of things have been percolating in the back of my mind for a long time.

First, since I was a kid in Latin class, I’ve wondered what it would have been like to have lived in Rome as the Empire was dying. Recently, it dawned on me (notice the narrowing sunrise-yellow horizon in the series?): I’m living through an exactly congruent collapse in America, if not in the world.

I grew up on the plains – think South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska - and I’ve always been peculiarly unsettled by abandoned buildings: Farmhouses, gas stations, country stories – places that once sustained life. Those are modern-day ruins.

What happens when entire swaths of our so-called civilization are left abandoned … as ruins, where once life was sustained? Poignant? Tragic? Who will witness it? Who will remember what once happened there? What happens to the stories?

We’re watching that happen – in the concrete world. And then there’s the political-social-interaction realm where civility and thoughtful exploration of ideas has gone the way of a compete-to-win ethic that erodes empathy and interpersonal concern. Ruins of a different sort.

Which brings me to a second, equally long-considered area of rumination: Language. Spoken, certainly, but also, especially in this case, written. The pertinence, here, even if the stories of our abandoned places of living are written down, what if they cannot be read any longer far out there in the future.

I recall wandering around England a few decades ago and being fascinated by the walls, one part of which could be a thousand years old with an added-on, jagged attachment that was a few hundred years old, and on and on. To current day.

And just like we can stop refurbishing the wall, we can stop building onto our language. And what if there is nobody to build onto the old wall? Or, again, nobody to read the written stories? What if the writing is a ruined remnant just like the deteriorating buildings and the crumbling interpersonal structure? Ruins and Runes. The modern day fall of empires.

Poignant.

I grew up in the plains - Minnesota, South Dakota, and Nebraska - where I saw a lot of grains. And I lived in Michigan where I saw a lot of forests. These pieces remind me of both ... and more.

Albert's comment fits a sometimes mood when I'm working; ostensibly a counterpoint to the complexity I may be wanting to capture. But then, sometimes simple can evoke a profound sense of the complexity of it all.

This series is about mildly guided unpredictability, not quite random but on the road to there. It's certainly true of the madness in response to Covid just as it's true of the paint laid on this paper. I think I was seeking to feel a bit of freedom after all the fear-informed constraints; wanting to feel a tad playful in counterpoint to the despair I experienced battling the regulatory world that had no interest whatsoever in a solution I and my cohort offered as an effective mitigation for people gathering. What did Cassandra do when nobody would listen? I'd like to think she painted.