6/6/98

   Sex appeal is alway good, but in understated fashion, I call these paintings, “the necklaces”.   Just a hint, but traversing the necklace is usually a key to solving the maze.  The inspiration is a poem I wrote in my young romantic days,  “It’s my picture, do not mock it;  for it is in my lady’s locket;  and everywhere she goes or rests, my face is there, between her breasts.”

1/15/99

  The round whorls were actually inspired by a bad meal at Burger King.  Maybe they didn’t clean the milkshake machine that day, because shortly after I finished eating, my whole system got purged.  Before I could even flush the excrement down the toilet, I began to puke on top of it, and as all those colors eventually swirled down the drain in a whorl, I realized, “hey, I can paint that”.   That’s how I began to use the web illusion to paint colorful whorls, a pattern that also occurs, non-psychedelically, in spiral galaxies, hurricanes, fingerprints, and heads of hair.  The smaller the lines, the faster the circles seem to spin, but only your head can explode.

5/15/99

  The round whorls were extremely difficult to construct.  The experience did improve my ability to make basic webs, starting with this one, which is much more sharply focused than its predecessors.  With greater control over the webs, I began to use them to make different things, such as using them for the background of portraits to cause the viewer to look right into the eye of the subject.