Piero’s Pearl

Triptych -- Acrylic on Canvas approximately 36” x 12

I saw Piero della Francesca’s “Sacred Conversation” (also called the Brera Madonna) in Milan in 2019. In the painting, from a shell shaped apse, an egg hangs on a gold string. Della Francesca skews his own perspectival inventions, for the egg to hover directly over Mary and child. A pearl of generativity.

Plough down sillion shine
(thanks to GM Hopkins)

Diptych – Acrylic and Gouache on canvas approximately 30” x 15”

Part of della Francesca’s Sacred Conversation’s domed apse meets straight lines that evoke a scale beyond human architecture. Gerard Manley Hopkins makes up words like “sillion”, to shine in his poem, The Windhover. For me, the poem is a cornerstone.

Not Before or After

Diptych – Acrylic and Gouache on canvas approximately 30” x 15”

…” Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.”
--- East Coker by TS Eliot

Scintillas

Diptych -- Acrylic on Canvas 24” x 12”

Ever watched dust motes dance in the light? A grain of sand is a million times bigger than DNA, which is 40 times bigger than an atom, which is 60,000 times bigger than a proton, which is 2000 times bigger than a quark. Per Jon Butterworth.

Through and Through

Diptych -- Acrylic, Gouache and Watercolor on Canvas 24” x 12”

Long fascinated by drapery in renaissance painting, I think what is curtained begs the question of what lies beyond. “For now, we only see through a glass, darkly” -- Corinthians 13:12.

From In Through

Acrylic, Gouache and Watercolor on Canvas 12” x 12”

The Hubble Space Telescope in 2015 took a gigapixel image of the Andromeda galaxy, enabling this rather mind-boggling 3-minute zoom into deep vast space

Brooding Bright

Acrylic, Gouache and Watercolor on Canvas 12” x 12”

“. . . the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which I cannot explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love, a sense of oneness with sun and stone, a thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern, perhaps to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to the tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

– Vladimir Nabokov, On life as a lepidopterist, 1948

Private Collection