Nucleus (June 2021)

August 2019 still-life of flowers morphs into a Baroque design

The original source material being photographed here was a vase of flowers sitting on a dining room table. Long after midnight I decided to make a couple of detail photographs of them. A few days later I "sandwiched" two of them together, making a new image. This image was duplicated four times, and flipped/rotated/reversed and then joined together, making the final image you see here. This image is very fun to look at, very entertaining, very hypnotic.  The central machine-like flower generator in the exact center is matched in weirdness only by the laughing face of the Dionysus-like creature at very top center. Finally, the viewer notices the pale "image" of a child's face emerging out of the center lower pattern as well. This child stares directly out of the frame, meeting the viewer's gaze. This photograph breaks expectations repeatedly, while still utilizing the tried-and-true compositional norms of the very late Renaissance.

Baroque Hallucination Fantasia Rapture, Rome, June 2019

This image was created on a swelteringly hot late afternoon in Rome. Walking through the Borghese Gardens, just past the Aurelian Wall portal. I noticed the beautiful trees which are quite different than I am used to, over four thousand miles away. I notice how the tops of the trees stand out against the sky, a kind of loose pattern. After a minute of fumbling around estimating the exposure details. I make two or three photos. One of them gets to serve as the single image from which this "quad" is formed. The Baroque aesthetic was of course coursing through my mind as I worked, and certainly is present in the "imperfect pearl", Baroque compositional design.

When I look at this creation, I see a delightful floating garden in the sky, upon which one might pleasantly, if carefully, stroll.

Pathway to the Greater Reality, August 2018

Star Map, May 2018.

This is an image of a supernova at the center of the universe. An exploding star: sending forth cosmic elements which will eventually form new planets and new species of life. And then, after the expanding blossom of the explosion recedes, the dying star will collapse and become a black hole, receding inward and consuming all that surrounds it.

This photograph is a combination of many individual photographs; using my camera I photographed many exposures of the floor of a chapel within Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago. Next, I combined these images into a single horizontal panorama. This new panorama of the floor in front of me, became my new "master": it was then repeated numerous times, and half of these were reversed, like mirror images. All of these images were then collected into one "canvas" and digitally "stitched" together using Photoshop.

Nuclear Mao Peach Flower (digital collage)