This Sunday is the opening reception for the March group show at Artists’ Gallery in Lambertville  (32 Coryell St, Lambertville, NJ).  Unlike most previous openings, this one takes place on a Sunday afternoon, from 2-6pm. This month’s theme is Madness, “an exhibition exploring chaos, passion, and general craziness,” mostly not related to basketball.

I’m exhibiting four paintings and two photographs.  The paintings  include Affordances, Figment, and a recent completion, Points of View:

Points of View (2009), acrylic on panel, 24 x 24 inches

Among the photographs I’m exhibiting is “Crazy Roots”, taken in Central Park several years ago:

Crazy Roots, photograph, 10x8 inches

I’m happy to share with you another new painting — completed just a couple of days ago — entitled Moving Forward.

Moving Forward, acrylic on panel, 24x24 inches, 2009

I’ve recently finished several paintings that I’ve been working on over the first six weeks of the new year and am now finally getting a chance to post them online.  First up is a painting that I finished in January entitled Affordances.

Affordances, acrylic on panel, 24"x24", 2009

I’ve just finished a new painting entitled, “Entanglement” (acrylic on canvas, 36″x36″, 2008):

It’s a little bit tough to capture this painting accurately on screen, as I’m using some paints that look different depending upon the light and the viewing angle.  Specifically, the underpainting includes a copper metallic paint that at some angles is a very saturated copper-red/orange, while at other angles is much more reflective of any incident light.  When you look at the work from the side, other features appear in a dark red that are not apparent in this photo.

The term “Entanglement” here refers to a property in quantum physics, as well as the nature of just about any relationship in the larger world.

I’ve just finished a painting entitled, “Arising” (30 x 30 inches, acrylic on panel).

I’ve just finished another painting in the “Strange Loops” series.  In this one, I’ve tessellated an overlapping triangular pattern, turned it into a loop, and then painted it with color progressions in such a way that you might detect a slight rotating motion if you look at the painting’s periphery.  (It’s a very weak version of a documented kind of optical illusion called the Peripheral Drift Illusion or the Fraser-Wilcox illusion; for an incredibly strong version of this effect, see Akiyoshi.)

A few weeks ago, a massive branch from one of the trees in our backyard fell down.  After going to work with the chainsaw to clear up most of the mess, I was left with a beautiful piece of wood that I thought might be interesting to work with.  I sliced off a few disks of wood with the chainsaw and then used a sanding disc attached to a power drill to smooth one of the surfaces.  I sealed the wood with a couple of layers of clear acrylic gesso and then began work on this painting, “Zentral Park.”  It’s based on a photo I took some years ago in Central Park of a peaceful scene in NYC.  This kind of piece makes for a nice change of pace from my abstract paintings.

I have just finished a new painting entitled Sheer Doing. The phrase “sheer doing” is common enough, but in this case it comes from the Daniel Gilbert book, Stumbling on Happiness. In this painting, the thumbnail doesn’t have enough detail to really capture what’s going on, so to see more you’ll need to click through to the detail page.

I have finally managed to properly photograph my painting Strange Loops 5, which was recently on display at the Mercer County Artists Show at The Gallery @ Mercer Community College. This painting is the fifth in my mini-series of “Strange Loops” paintings. The phrase “strange loop” comes from Douglas Hofstadter, first described I think in Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, but elaborated on more fully in his 2007 book, I Am a Strange Loop.

The notion of a strange loop refers to a kind of recursive hierarchy of multiple levels of abstraction that eventually loop back to where you started from. Hofstadter often uses as a kind of metaphor the idea of pointing a video camera at a TV showing the output of the video camera — it’s possible to end up with rather startling feedback loops that seem to take on a life of their own. Hofstadter talks about “The Self” as being a kind of strange loop within the brain. My paintings in this series try to capture some of this, though I don’t think you can look at them in any sense as “pictures” of strange loops. But, as Hofstadter is a big fan of Escher, I use Escher-like tessellations of patterns, wrapped around in one or more loops of various kinds as the foundation for these paintings. I also try to imbue the works with multiple levels of colors, layers, and patterns that might click differently depending upon how you look at the work.

I’ve just finished a new painting called Phenomenal Character (acrylic on panel, 30 x 30 in., 2008). The term is one sometimes used in the philosophy of mind or in cognitive science and refers to “what it is like” to have a perceptual experience. In a more ordinary sense, the phrase could imply a narrative or refer to one’s moral traits (or perhaps just describe a really great bit of typography).