Nut Series - 24 Print

This is a work from the Nut series from 2022. In my view these works center on human conceptions of self as an uncrackable and enigmatic nut, or perhaps a ceaselessly complex nut of many points and edges. Many of the works have shape formations ranging outside of the natural and purpose driven forms one would find in the natural world, and into semi cubist forms. Those shattered forms are gathered back together from the classical cubist view into one view, carrying abnormal or unconventional shape as a result. The coalescence of the splintered deconstructed cubist view back into a cohesive whole that may or may not be cohesive any longer, when seen reconstituted as a whole. Over the past century the seed of cubist thinking has evolved into a full landscape of thought, upon which modern society has founded a great many of it's current ideas. That these works are paintings of seeds is not without purpose, in them the seed is represented as the human idea and in a broader sense, the realm of human thinking. Where are we now in that structure of thinking which has been collectively built over the past century, once those ideas are brought back together, and potentially assessed for the empirical social value they have wrought? Though every seed is not a nut, each nut holds a seed within. In these works the husk as a symbolic form of the human is put forth. The husk is often used to refer to the physical body of a person when referencing death, life, or mortality. This series is a revision of the classical model of the still life. They are an attempt to transform the study of nature and the natural object in the classical model of the still life, into an extended and extrapolated symbol of human nature and human thinking.