"Was a Mountain", part of the Incongruent series presents a geological autobiography written in sedimentary layers and time's relentless cycles.

This monumental rock formation, with its stratified bands of coral, ochre, and slate, carries within its structure the compressed memory of ancient peaks ground down by millennia, their remains deposited on prehistoric sea floors alongside the detritus of countless sea creatures, then compressed under immense pressure into new stone, thrust skyward again into fresh mountains—an endless cycle of destruction and rebirth written in mineral language.

The interior landscape—a familiar scene from the artist's daily bike ride—creates a temporal dialogue between deep geological time and the human scale of everyday experience.

The painting asks profound questions about transformation and cyclical time: what if stones could remember not just their mountain origins, but their entire journey through the great wheel of geological becoming?

What if the rocks encountered on routine shoreline walks and inland hillsides carried stories of their multiple incarnations—mountain, seafloor sediment, fossil bed, mountain again?

Through meticulous attention to the sedimentary layers and the careful integration of two distinct visual vocabularies, the work becomes a meditation on the eternal dance between erosion and uplift, the patient poetry hidden within geology's endless recycling of matter and time.

This is Personal Formalism operating across vast temporal scales—where daily bike rides become encounters with deep history, each stone a chapter in an epic that never truly ends, only transforms.