Inner space (nerve landscapes)

To be in closer touch with what’s going on within, I draw my nerves at their tiniest endpoints, at the very places where feeling is being felt, or movement initiated.  It’s at the smallest level of scale that the floating colors imagery most closely echoes the forms of nature.  As I venture deeper into inner space, my new drawings are still anchored in anatomical reality … but I’m finding a different balance between real and imagined.  

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The story behind the art

top: microscopic image of motor neurons
below: floating colors drawing

Like a lens where the eye of imagination can be refocused, the dense drops of the floating colors open to reveal their inner structure ….  an opening of vision into the smallness and subtlety of inner space. 

For someone whose physical life is constricted and whose range in the world is limited, this sense of an inward opening is wonderfully liberating.  Inside my body I find a world I can marvel at and never get to the end of, a cosmos of infinitely unfolding detail. 

As I venture deeper into inner space, I see neural networks reflected in the crystalline webs of the floating colors. To explore beyond the limits of what can be seen with the naked eye, I use micrographic images from NYU’s Virtual Microscope and other sources.

More: On the drawing board - what I’m working on now

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