Galactic Fluke

Since the year is pretty new and my bright hopes and shining dreams for 2019 are still intact, here is a Friday evening blog post!  I have been worried that I have not been devoting sufficient time to blogging.  In particular I have lately been especially bad about responding in a timely fashion to anybody gracious enough to post a comment.  I promise I will work hard on doing a better job writing and responding this year, so keep those comments coming!  In the meantime, kindly find a picture of the first sculpture which I finished in 2019: “Galactic Fluke,” which is carved out of wood and adorned with a handmade polymer galaxy and plastic stars.  When I pulled that galaxy out of the oven it looked like a millipede with hairy waving legs…and it was no picnic making it adhere properly to the fluke instead of to my fat fingers.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize the flounder as the quixotic avatar of all Earth life in my recent artworks. Concerned friends and relatives have asked why the Pleuronectiformes have so completely infiltrated my ouevre–so I will answer that question in greater depth in 2019 (the emotional side of the story involves a confessional story about my life, and the intellectual side of the story involves a treatise on environmentalism and musings about the future of all of humankind).

This sculpture however transcends such concerns–this is, after all, a galactic fluke…a very great flounder indeed! It represents the apogee of my desires–life transcendent and all-present at an incomprehensibly vast scale.  One of my friends said that his mother, a devout Muslim, was worried that my art is idolatrous (!) which is difficult to respond to, but I do certainly try to imbue my conception of the numinous  into my flounder works.  I have never found a bunch of rules from ancient near-eastern sages to be particularly supernatural…but the interlocking destinies of lifeforms living together in complex ecosystems does inspire me with feelings of transcendent awe.  The great web of life on Earth is the closest thing we know to divinity–save perhaps for the celestial grandeur of outer space with all of its scope and mystery.  This small sculpture is an attempt to bring these two sacred concepts together in poplar, paint, and plastic.

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