In July of 1977 inspired by Escher, I made a pilgrimage to the Alhambra. Having arrived in the early hours a bit under the weather I thought that I had a cold or the flu. But amazingly, it seemed, that after hours of exposure to the calm and harmonic resonance of the palace and gardens I felt completely well. Of course I found that viewing the encyclopedic and miraculous array of periodic space-division was awesome and inspirational. What I didn't expect was an epiphenous ontologic experience of life changing proportion. Standing at one of the portals - over looking the city - I looked through a large plate of contemporary safety glass which had most likely been positioned to prevent young children from falling to their death. However it also had a phenomenological function. It quite superbly reflected an adjacent section of the intricate Moorish tessellation and in effect composited it over the viewable scene below which was comprised of various types of 'figuration' consisting of buildings, plant life, rock formations etc. It was here in an instant, that the essential pictorial metaphor of my oeuvre was born.

In the Summer of 1978 I read the book "The Tao of Physics" by Frijof Capra. It basically exploded my personal outlook and presented me with a comprehensive conceptual basis on which to support my work's explicate graphical metaphor. The basic premise of the book is that the world-view and specifically the general description of sub-atomic phenomena by Western particle physicists is becoming almost interchangeable with that of the description of reality found in the major forms of Eastern mysticism.

Capra's systemic comparison of the two disciplines implies a compelling cosmography and so it follows that Escher's zoomorphic tessellation, as both perceptual phenomena and as metaphor, points to a visual art that embodies and in a sense is an artifact of a kind of multi-sensorial and metaphysical "seeing." For example, Escher's print called "Reptiles" illustrates quite nicely, in analogy, the dynamic tendency of subatomic events or medio-cosmic scaled packages of life-force to appear and disappear - their vital patterns and symmetry temporarily discerned as they come in and out of being from and back into an underlying morphogenetic field or taking it a bit further in mystical terms - the void-matrix. It is no accident that scientist Chen Ning Yang used Escher's pattern No. 67 of glide-reflection horseman to illustrate his application of apprehended symmetry operations in his exploration of particle physics in 1961.

"The Tao of Physics" also seemed to connect Salvador Dali's idiosyncratic yet visionary "Nuclear Mysticism" to the enigma of Escher's semiotic symmetric zoomorphic lexicon. In his own monarchical Surrealist quasi-Christian way - Dali tuned into the premise of the book over twenty years before it was published...as quoted in his Mystical Manifesto of 1951 "The major crises of Dalian mysticism basically derives from progress in the exact sciences in our age, especially the metaphysical spirituality of substantiality in quantum physics...."

In August of 1979, I visited Den Hague, Holland, for the first time spending about 8 days straight making hand-transcriptions of Escher's personal notebooks at the Gemeentemuseum. I received special permission to do so from the Escher Foundation which was then housed in the museum. It was here seeing up close the dot to dot coordinates in the graph paper notebooks that I was finally able to unlock the mystery of Escher's 2D zoomorphic tessellation methods. Influenced by how Escher and his wife made copies of the Moorish tiles at the Alhambra, I thought of in turn making transcriptions of Escher's notebooks and building on what he did with the patterns. Incidentally Escher's dot plottings and animal perimeter line connections has much in common conceptually with computer generated vector graphics. Also the underlying cartesian grid of the graph paper is not unlike the underlying pixel grid employed in digital raster graphics. Moreover the dark-light / yin-yang animal-prana-envelope toggling, metaphors the a priori on-off phenomenology of the digital domain in general.

I could have easily emulated the positive and negative figure-ground interchangeability of Escher's zoomorphics... but I wanted to do something a bit different. Operating on the premise that from an earthling's vantage point the ultimate space-time periodic-unit is the human body - local prana-envelope transformers of Brahman. These said units connect together and mirror each other in various ways. Moreover using a holographic analogy: one human consciousness intuits the whole of universe. This was in fact the basis for my rationale to eliminate the figure-ground self-similarity parameter in creating Escher-like repeating animal and insect patterns. For instance, looking at photos of groups of parachutists holding hands on the way down, notice the abstract or non-objective interstitial spaces between the homosapien symmetry units...you don't see the one to one figure-ground toggle. Funnily enough, at the time I did not reference the fact of the perennial and ubiquitous use of open arrays and openly linked styles of tiling the plane found in textile pattern design - especially in botanicals.

By 1985 I had virtually discontinued the use of traditional media as a means to generate imagery. However my seminal interest in geometrical structure, periodic space division and polyhedra has continued to be an integral part of my ongoing digital work. I have always maintained that the graphical and mathematical territory that M.C. Escher first explored and charted in the 20th century will remain a well-spring of significant inquiry now and well into the future.

1980: SLATED BREAKFAST-VISCERAL ANALYTIC

Slated Breakfast - Visceral Analytic is based on a photograph I saw of 2 secretaries having lunch on a park bench in an old 1964 National Geographic magazine. Regarding the picture's title - to my mind a 'slated breakfast' is a meal that is scheduled ... pre-planned like in the corporate world. The picture is expressive - charged with visceral content but it also contains a left-brain component - an analytical aspect. I rendered it three times. First as a graphite drawing in November 1980. Then as a large 4x6 foot canvas on mounted masonite 1981-82 and finally as a small oil on canvas in the Summer of 1981.

I had this notion of bringing Escher's zoomorphics into the domain of painting...using them as a metaphor for the metaphysical channel that was operative in any given scene. My motivations for painting the large version was simply that I thought those animal forms would look good at large scale resonating in oil...I also thought I might make a series of large paintings but I never did - this is the only one.

Breakfast is an amalgam of 4 different pictorial styles. Post-cubist planarism with perceptual in-out / push-pull action which is paradoxically penetrated by a "Renaissance" triangulated 2-point perspectival scaffolding which supports the foreshortened over-head zoomorphic tessellation panel as well as the array of similarly texture-mapped blocks. Finally the painterly environment is enhanced with an iterative duo of allegorical surrealistic figures.

1983: VOID MATRIX LATTICE

Void Matrix Lattice was initially done for the April '83 issue of Movement Newspaper to illustrate an article on Carl Pribram's holographic brain theory entitled "The Real New Wave." For me Void was a break-through piece. Combining intermittent clusters of Isotropic Vector Matria or Octet-truss sub-divisions of its inclusive tetrahedral perspectival enclosure - while also referencing Escher's perspectival pun from Relativity as well as the back of a young boy on a chair as a reference to Dali's painting called Suntable. In 1984, I wrote this poem-like description of the piece: "Best described as an inventory of implications: A child is having an out of body experience. Local and minimum case of inside outside: Tetra-hedral enclosure of 'convergent-divergent space-frame parallels'. Vectorial cartography - pockets of equilibria resonance - an oblivious parent with child in hand. The young boy turns his head and sees an apparition of himself with daddy in extra-corporeal suspension. On the chair, older brother sees it too....however non-simultaneous and refracted to a different position in space-time, less clear and polyhedrally inscribed. To wit: Renaissance perspective is a tetra-system - itself a polyhedral enclosure - suggesting the notion of subdividing its polyvertexic volume into a matrix of smaller polyvertexial domains."

It was around this time that I synchronously came upon a book edited by Ken Wilber called the "Holographic Paradigm and other Paradoxes: exploring the leading edge of Science" which dealt with the same subject matter as the Pribram article. This book, like the "Tao of Physics", 5 years earlier, impacted my thinking and graphical work. "The Holographic Paradigm" includes an amazing short paper by William A. Tiller which puts forth a generalized description of the structure of space as being embedded in the spirit - which I would interpret as omni-cymatic embodiment, i.e. void-matrix nodal density in holonomic 4D refraction. Tiller goes on to say that this space is a six dimensional Euclidean space articulated as a close-packed hexagonal lattice with active nodal points. Other than the Euclidean part - this is all sounds a lot like a description of an aspect of Fuller's Isotropic Vector Matrix (IVM).

1987: ECTOPLASMIC KITCHEN

Ectoplasmic Kitchen was my first consummate computer graphic picture. It was included in my first public showing of computer art in February 1988 at the Brand Library in Glendale, California, and 10 years later it appeared in the "Homage to Escher" exhibition at the M.C. Escher Centennial Congress held in Rome, Italy 1998. "Ectoplasmic Kitchen" combines Escher inspired open-packed zoomorphic patterns enclosed in a Synergetics derived great-circle spherical domain.

Utilizing some language inspired by R. Buckminster Fuller I wrote about this image in 1990. "We see a person inside a great-circle spherical attention-span bubble crystalized in sympathetic resonance. This image being an assembled metaphysical snap-shot of a consciousness embodied - tuned to a psychically-charged 'considerable-set'. The zoomorphics in this case signify brahman-transformer prana envelopes in the animal-icon guise of chicken, lizard and newt. These are arrayed symmetrically about double 3-fold roto-centers. The creatures emerge from an underlying triangular and hexagonal grid. The red lines are highlighted furniture and table-object edge-vector perspectival trajectories converging toward various implied vanishing points. The pictorial space is rendered as flat, spherical and in perspective all at once."

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