the pitter patter of patterns

 I have always considered myself a person with "nervous hands." I cannot keep my hands still if I am in a lecture -or a bar. On the phone with my family.......memo pads deserve a curated show!

My most recent body of work has evolved from the doodles I created while suffering through some presentations a few quarters ago. 

Through a collision of information completely unrelated to one another, I have considered changing my position on free style mark making being "just doodles." They may be a very specific response to very specific stimuli. And EVERYONE does it to one degree or another.

So check this out. I was given a hot book tip from a relative who is minister and an engineer. This is relevant, because she and I have polar opposite understandings of faith,spirituality, and its practice. But  we completely agree that it is necessary to think about it. -Circling back! She gave me this hot tip on a book called "The Shack," by Wm Paul Young.  I am not writing a book review, so check it out on your time. But what is pertinent to this posting is the reference in the book to a mans soul being like a unkempt garden, beautiful but a mess. But from above, it is a fractal, which by definition is anything But a mess. It is a very specific pattern, repeated ad- infinitum, and no matter how magnified, it maintains its system. Bit of a brain buster. Consider that your DNA is constant regardless of where it is, toe nail, saliva,blood-it is YOU on the micro level as well as the macro level reading this.  And I am not a scientist, but I do like to garden, so the metaphor caught my imagination.

So the second, seemingly unrelated bit of info to insist I pay attention happened in my Art of Ancient India class. (hang in there with me, it's almost over!) The discussion was about the Indian perception  of the universe being constantly created and destroyed  simultaneously. (One does have to give up the faith in linear progression of ANYTHING to play with this paradigm). With this as the starting point (RIGHT?), the understanding that the micro and the macro of the universe is organized using SACRED GEOMETRY.  And  an aspect of this geometry is recognized in the visual vibration of PATTERN.

Now,I am going to bring it home! The third bit of information I came across was in a book called,"Color, A Natural History of the Palette," by Victoria Finlay. Check this out!! She points out the universe is composed of electromagnetic waves. The human eye can see it as light, and we can only distinguish 10 million variations within it. Now when we see the whole range, it is perceived as "white". When some wave lengths are missing, we perceive it as "color." Yes, that is boring, but check this out-Everything has the electromagnetic wave stuff going on. So when light encounters matter, both change because they are trying to match wave patterns-what we see as a red apple, is because, the pattern that doesn't match is the one we see as RED!

Yes. I am a nerdiac, and that's hot.

Back to the work at hand. "If", humans, being simultaneously matter and spirit that share a frequency, do we respond to the harmony and discord, around us? Do we capture that in our thoughtless doodling? As Artists, we are vibrating at a frequency that allows us to see the colors as we do, and we are compelled to organize them as art to create some subatomic harmony in the world. Are all those memo pad scribbles where we capture the pattern and rhythms of what is and isn't said, but felt?

Now go to Google Images and search Dali Lama/ Mandalas and Fractal Art, it will change your frequency!!!