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.