NOUMENON
2014 - 2021
In the winter of 2014, a friend gave me a small watercolor painting: a black 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.
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, hence the title.
The top central part represents a Noumenal star radiating outward through geometric grids - a visual allegory for unknowable cascading into perceivable phenomena.
Friend's original watercolor painting - 2014
Digital remake - 2014
Noumenon - Split in Half
Noumenal Pedestal - 2021
The pedestal, situated on an endless grid - the Cartesian promise that reality is mappable. The pedestal consists of five layers of ever-smoother platforms. Atop the platforms sits a half-star upholding a thin white sheet arrested mid-ripple by a black bead and a translucent pearl above it. Higher still is a noumenal sphere inscribed with fractal motifs.
Geometry, disturbance, and patterned totality align on one axis: a meditation on how measured space engenders intelligible form.
Detailed close up look
Noumenal Entiry - 2019
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.
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.
Detailed close up look
Sphere of Noumena
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.
Spherical Noumenon - 2015
Sphere of Noumena 2
"Unfolding" - 2017
"An Owl" - 2015
"Pelts" - 2017
Inspired by the philosophical call to "know thyself," my own psyche drives this creative pursuit. It allows me to explore visual symbolism of mystical experiences and to visualize what words cannot convey: a direct encounter with the Kantian noumenon, a "thing-in-itself."
This is a plunge into what some call the Godhead, Brahman, Ein Sof, Plato's "The Good," or Plotinus’ "The One."
Art Prints section will soon be available.
For any inquiries please reach out here.