My art story is a long and winding road with many stops along the way. I entered college with every intention of going to medical school to become a surgeon. As a break from all of my science and chemistry classes, I included an art or design class every semester to break up an otherwise intense schedule. Around the time I had a major project due, my dad introduced me to a relatively “new” (1975) discovery in the world of mathematics- fractals. After doing some research, I recognized a distinct relationship to natural forms, and found the vivid colors (generated arbitrarily) endlessly fascinating.

Inspired, I created a series of paper and canvas artworks based on fractal categories, and worked independently with a mathematics professor to understand how certain math functions created the self-similar archetypes (known as the Mandelbrot set, the Julia set, or the Dragon Curve). My earliest paintings reflect an interest for this “beautiful math” which ignited an interest in the forms, symmetry, and patterns also found in nature and architecture, in the Fibonacci series (known as the “golden mean”), and in Celtic spirals. After a short period, I saw my fractal paintings as kitschy and without a background story or deeper connection. While the infinite color combinations were mesmerizing, my interest in fractals waned. I wanted to do more with my science background but wasn’t sure how to express it.

After seeing a life-changing exhibition by Terry Winters at the Whitney Museum in New York, my drawings and paintings from this time reflect my attraction to biological forms. I painted variegated cellular forms and plant life by presenting them in groupings or by classification and building a framework out of smaller canvases. With Primary I found a distinctly modern voice, and it was the inception of my newest body of work. Visually, it was a reduced, deconstructed, and flattened spherical depiction of a cellular form meant to embody a simplified, abstracted visual representation of all cells.

Future projects: I am intrigued by astronomy with its daily celestial changes and cyclical patterns. To carry my painting imagery to a further parallel, the gradual application of globular shapes, dots, and drips could mirror the hazy Milky Way. Additional exploration into terms like “nebulae”, “galaxy”, or “constellation” has created a new interest in how these words might be visualized in my artwork. I envision how my paintings could reflect a bigger world “out there”. These new paintings could then relate to the rest of my artwork as their own self-similar fractal, but on a much grander scale.

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