3/14/97

  The hint of a face that you can see in this painting was entirely unintentional.  It only served to throw me off track for several months as I tried to recreate the effect deliberately.

2/17/98

  This was my first decent web, I finally made the lines small enough to allow the brain to perceive the optical illusion.  There are no round lines used in the painting but the brain refuses to believe that.  Try following a line all the way around the circle and you will see that there isn’t any roundness there at all.  Why is your brain playing this trick on you?

   The brain’s lightning-fast circle perception is a result of evolution.  Even small children can recognize spider webs, and according to the scientists, the spider web recognition ability is hard-wired into our brains at birth.  That’s why you see the web illusion first, despite the lack of actual roundness.  At some point in the evolutionary past, it must have been very beneficial to recognize deadly spider webs.  You know how the theory of evolution is supposed to work;  the tribe with the genetic ability to recognize deadly spider webs propagates more successfully than the tribe that cannot recognize deadly spider webs;  so when the volcano erupts and wipes out the valley, the handful of survivors are likely to be from the tribe that can recognize deadly spider webs.  The confirmation problem with this theory is that we haven’t found a lot of deadly spiders in the fossil record.  However, it’s possible that this critical recognition ability was imprinted in our brains long before we were humans;  it could date back to the time when we were all dragonflies.  Of course, if you are a Republican, you probably don’t believe a word of this.  But right there in front of your eyes are interactive optical illusions, so let’s just agree that my paintings are smarter than your paintings, and we’ll let it go at that.