Do what you must first, then what you’d like

Divide this one at an angle from the top left to the bottom right, from the 11 to the 5 on a clock face, and you’ll see that the two halves conform to a rough bilateral symmetry. Like a Rorschach inkblot or a face. This is right at the beginning of that though, the transition from a radially symmetrical single celled organism to something with the suggestion of a front and back end. In fact, it looks a bit like somebody made a balloon animal of a diatom, shiny in the yellow light.

I heard something about a a mid-twentieth century artist, I don’t remember specifics, who destroyed an abstract painting because someone told him that part of it looked like a rabbit, and after that he couldn’t unsee it. For my part, I’m a fan of pareidolia. Seeing patterns in unrelated things reminds me they aren’t really unrelated, that they are part, as are we all, of the one thing that is happening.

36”x36”
acrylic on canvas
private collection