Many years of work from the figure—of developing aggressive but sensitive line work and mark-making—led to a return to academia to further explore the workings of the body. I pursued the medical school prerequisites of organic chemistry, physiology, microbiology, and anatomy, including dissections of cadavers.

Two years afterward, those studies filtered into my work and my thinking.

Is it a case of “as above, so below” — that there are echoes of the microcosm in the macrocosm? Did organelles organize into cells, and then cells into organs, in patterns that are similar to the way people organize into communities? Nature certainly seems enthusiastic to create fantastical forms of life and let whatever works, work.

These recent paintings are explorations into the way life evolves, organizes, and reorganizes in ever greater levels of complexity. Some of the images began as figure studies and others have grown and morphed from a base layer of photographic imagery from advertising and bus shelter ads. These images are subsumed in a maelstrom of organic improvisation, in a growth of joints, limbs, tubules, viscera, teeth, animal and plant parts, and microscopic life.