My Art
“Art is what happens when your soul has a story to tell.”
I’ve worked on multiple artistic projects over the years, in a variety of different styles and media. I once worried that I didn’t have a single “style” and my work didn’t fall into a particular category. I’ve since made peace with that, because art is about expressing yourself in ways that words cannot. And sometimes how you do that changes. That’s OK. Once I learned that I’m not making art FOR anyone, it stopped bothering me when I changed direction and people didn’t like the “new stuff” (or the old stuff!). Now I just create what the universe wants me to create at that particular moment in time.
“Retro tech” acrylic on canvas
My retro tech, or “Retrocortex,” work covers most of what I do with physical paint and other materials on canvas. Over the years I’ve tried mostly every artistic medium possible: Oil pastels, oil paint, charcoal, pencil, gouache, watercolor… I started focusing on acrylics because I like their ease of use and their bright, bold colors that can be combined with different textures and gel media. This doesn’t mean I won’t explore other media or combinations of them in the future!
Whilst I’d been painting on real canvases on and off for many years, 2014 was when I really started moving away from digital painting and towards the creation of physical artifacts. Part of the reason I moved into art in the physical world is that it had become easier and easier to create beautiful digital art pieces using various photo stitching and paintover techniques (and of course early generative AI techniques had started to make an appearance). I felt like my style of digital painting in photoshop (which took 30-50 hours per piece) was being outpaced by other digital techniques, and I just wasn’t keeping up. I was also exploring the future of AI in my work, and I could see that in the future, physical art would be much harder for AI to create than digital art (although I’m sure one day robots will be better than us humans at this too). I also liked the idea of having physical art, bursting with texture, dimensions, effects and imperfections on my wall - more so than prints of digital pieces.
My Retrocortex work explores the themes of technology versus nature, chaos versus order, and the fabric of reality itself. This artistic urge likely comes from the same fascination with consciousness and physics, but expressed in a different way.
You’ll see recurring themes, such as the concept of the “Ghost in the Machine” (quantum cats embedded in electronic circuits), and the mixing of impossible-to-replicate chaotic pour effects with the geometric perfection of circuit lithography - by definition something that needs to be replicated millions of times without error.
I explore themes of what technology means for our life and for our purpose in the universe.
Mandalas & Sacred Geometry
I’m fascinated by spirituality and symbolism. Both scientists and spiritual thinkers have used special symbols - and the relationships between them - to explain reality for thousands of years. Recently, modern physics theories talk about the deepest models we have of reality being geometric in nature, such as the mathematician Nima Arkani-Hamez’s “Amplituhedron.” Meanwhile, mystics have spoken of concepts such as Indra’s Net, again the idea of a vast network of interconnected shapes and energies that underlies our being.
I like playing with these ideas artistically, as I believe art gives us different channels and pathways for our mind to solve problems that we may normally be conditioned to think about mathematically or scientifically.
Gothic Fall
Before deciding that physical art was the direction I wanted to go in, I focused primarily on digital painting in a fantasy gothic style. During the period 2004-2014 I created many digital pieces. I wrote poems to accompany the artworks, in order to explore the theme from multiple different angles at the same time. My work was published as a book originally in 2008 by the Spanish publishing house NORMA Editorial, and later the rights were purchased by US publisher Heavy Metal who released an English edition.
The themes I explored during this time were also in the space of opposites, but rather than technology and nature I explored the concepts of good versus evil, and beauty versus horror.
I also like to think about my GothicFall work as embodying the trials of the ego - if you notice there are almost always characters in the paintings, depicting human egos (although some of these are not in the realm of the living). GothicFall was about the human attempting to tap into the divine realm - and discovering power and beauty, but also depths of emotional tragedy.
My post GothicFall work takes a wider perspective, becoming more abstract, to represent consciousness, life, and the nature of the universal truth - but in a way that transcends the restrictions of embodiment in the human form.
I believe this mirrors my professional work in robotics and AI, which now attempts to transcend physicalism in order to try to understand consciousness beyond our specific and limited human experience.
