As Above, So Below

Stand back first. Take in the whole 40×60 sweep of it — because this painting has a cosmology, and it won’t give you everything at once.

Up top, the world of light: eagle rays gliding like birds through shattered, refracted aqua, spheres drifting in slow orbit — planets, bubbles, suns, you decide. The water up here behaves like sky.

Down below, the world of weight and warmth: a great red octopus, his body glowing like heat under cold water, like life insisting on itself. His arms pour downward through the blue, looping into enormous rings that bloom beneath him — and inside those rings, small worlds of violet, green, and gold, orbiting. The same circles that float above him, he draws below. A school of white squid streams past his mantle like thrown light.

And right down the middle, the seam where two canvases meet — the divide becomes the water itself, the place where two worlds touch. His arms cross it like it isn’t there. The rays sail through it. Above mirrors below, below answers above, and the octopus is the hinge between them.

This is a painting that pulls you in and won’t let you leave until you’ve found everything hiding in it. And every time you come back, something else has surfaced.