NOUMENON
2014 - 2021
Original watercolor painting
In the winter of 2014, a friend gave me a small watercolor painting: a blac and purple compass star framed by simple geometric shapes. Every time I looked at that star it drew me into a quiet, almost trance-like focus, and soon the motif became a mild obsession. I scanned the piece, recreated it as a digital illustration, and then rebuilt the star in 3D.
With the model finished, I sliced, stretched, twisted, and replicated it by the hundreds - tiling it into patterns, rolling it into cylinders, setting it swaying and whirling. That purple-black compass star became both the point of departure and the steady axis of an ongoing body of work.
What you see next grew out of countless late-night sessions in my home studio, beginning in late 2014.
Digital remake
Certificate of Noumenosity - 2019
Awarded for perceptual transcendence beyond the phenomenal realm... On a more serious note, I was planning for this piece to look like a certificate or a diploma of sorts.
The top central part represents a Noumenal star radiating outward through geometric grids: a visual allegory for unknowable cascading into perceivable phenomena.
Noumenon - Split in Half
Animated Extraction
"Convergence" 2020
Animated Extraction
"Skin" 2020
Noumenal Entiry - 2019
Dialectic of concealment & revelation
As if split in half the Noumenon reveals an entity that's emerging, or emanating from inside, patterns of stars and other shapes, rendered at varying magnitudes, produce a fractal cadence: the local mirrors the global; the global resonates through the local. Scale is epistemic.
Noumenal Pedestal - 2021
An infinite grid grounds 5 layers of ever smoother platform. The endless grid is a pure abstraction, the Cartesian promise that reality is mappable. Atop of the grid sits a half - star, serving as a pedestal upholding a thin white sheet arrested mid-ripple by a solitary black bead. Above hangs a translucent seed and, higher still, a sphere inscribed with fractal motifs. Geometry, disturbance, and patterned totality align on one axis: a meditation on how measured space engenders intelligible form.
Animated Extraction
"Noumenal waves"
Animated Extraction "Interlocking net"
Observing the heart of the matter - 2021
A black geometric cage cradles a glowing violet heart - the soul sheltered by matter. Rings of unblinking eyes revolve around the enclosure, suggesting that consciousness both surveys and is surveyed, forever poised between freedom and form.
Animated Extraction "Overflowing"
Spherical Noumenon - 2015
Sibyl at the Noumenal Nexus - 2020
The Sibyl sits within an immense, inverted sphere of a condensed noumena.
She becomes the lone “known” element inside an otherwise abstract and unfathomable reality.
I picked this statue from the collection of Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC for her distinct contemplative pose, which crystallizes human interiority: thought, doubt and intuition. She is framed precisely at the point where the patterned sphere touches the undulating floor a liminal hinge between solid form (statue) and abstract pattern of a noumenal field.
"Bodhisattva in a Binary Shroud" - 2021
A Greco-Buddhist head of Bodhisattva - salvaged from the Tapa Shotor monastery, later destroyed by the Taliban - floats in a rushing field of coded light. Binary glyphs ripple across a translucent veil, half-hiding, half-revealing the timeless gaze. Past and algorithm collide: what becomes of wisdom when it is streamed rather than remembered?
"Skin" 2020
"Unfolding" - 2017
"Going Inside" - 2017
"Skin 2" - 2021
"An Owl" - 2015
"Scars" - 2019
"Pelts" - 2017
My own psyche, inspired by the philosophical call to "know thyself", acts as the main instigator of this creative pursuit, allowing me to explore visual symbolism of a mystical experience.
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I try to visualize that which is impossible to effectively convey in words, a direct encounter with a Kantian "noumenon", a thing in itself, a dive into what some call the Godhead, Brahman, Ein Sof, Plato's "The Good", Plotinus’ "The One".
Art Prints section will soon be available.
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