Synaptic Connections

Part of a series of paintings that explores the way we see. Most of the pictures begin as an intricate web drawn on a dark canvas evocative of the mass of interconnected neurons of the retina and the neural web of the brain.

Our experience of the world changes as light casts patterns onto the retina. These changes bring about patterns in the neural web as a sequence of firing neurons. The mind is also concerned with a multiplicity of other experiences, states of emotion, subordinate thoughts and dreaming. These states arise also in the neural network. All is happening concurrently.

The paintings explore the multiple levels that exist in our conciousness. Patterns (deeper more abstract state of the mind) are an undertext of the web, not easily visible in the finished painting, but the images are effected by the nature of the underlying pattern. An unconcious distortion caused by innate characteristics and preconceptions.

The paintings are also concerned with the dynamic, trembling nature of sight where our visual experience is built up by a shifting eye and a retentive brain. A mass of sharp data from only a small part of the retinal image is constructed into a whole trembling experience. The facets and graded planes of the painting reflect this phenomena.

These paintings form part of a body of work begun many years ago entitled 'City as Parasite'. They are concerned with the nervous system of the city, founded as it is on the complex structure of the human brain.

The view the series click here