into the universe

As if everything loves to turn in a circle, within the atomic and within the cosmic, turning rapturously round and round, stars burst into light, lighting up heaven. Their light, turning and spreading through heaven from the beginning, made patterns, starting with the very first star. My work, spontaneous and, I should add, guided by the wisdom of night dreams, begins in much the same way. In the late 90s, I painted with watercolors inside the church and in Central Park. Soon, without realizing it, I began to paint only the light in both spaces, I painted circles of light that grew larger and more perfect as I continued. In 2001, I scanned the watercolors and began to make radial patterns, cutting and pasting them on the computer, using Photoshop. Later I grouped them together like star constellations and projected a multitude of them onto my computer screen. I started to play, compressing and expanding them. Suddenly, I zoomed in and I saw some of those patterns lit up like stars and galaxies. I knew what I was seeing was cosmic - it was the universe. That was the beginning of a more than twenty-year voyage into space. I blew up stars and merged galaxies, at will or haphazardly. I kept discovering new realms and kept modifying them into new cosmic visions by rendering space malleable. I sculpted them by warping them, much the way galaxies warp one another. I created many series, each with a multitude of variations.