I create this artwork explicitly to arouse awe. I want to engage your curiosity and imagination and evoke the sublime wonder that you might experience when looking at a deep space picture from the Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope.
Often those astronomical images provide an expanded view by bringing forth a normally invisible part of the electromagnetic spectrum or by computer enhancement into something human eyes can appreciate. Such photographs do not "capture an instant" but rather have a depth that may be measured in billions of years. With consideration, there is no reason to accept such pictures as objectively true. They are but a metaphorical tool to aid our understanding.
Mathematicians develop equations that predict additional dimensions of space in which our perceived 3-dimensional world exists as a subset; cosmologists imagine parallel bubble universes where physical laws may be incongruent with ours, and physicists hypothesize a fundamental String Theory that requires a multidimensional universe differentiated by oscillations.
These possibilities transcend science and metaphysics and inform my metaphorical paintings of etic realities - dimensions or realities that we here in this universe do not have sufficient reference to understand, language to define, or senses to perceive - but they may be experienced. It is our nature to catalog incoming information into established, if transient, physical and psychological paradigms (which are themselves conceptualizations and not rooted in concrete reality). At best, our brains can create a visual interpretation out of perceptions that are not truly visual.
Through a deep emotional connection, this work is a distillation of these otherworldly perceptions into comprehensible visual equivalents, although - like the deep space photographs - the source expression is beyond visual. The paintings reference unknown physical or metaphysical phenomena of a different reality and invite a paradigm shift in our understanding of the greater meaning we attach to what we see.
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity."
Albert Einstein