Nerve landscapes

The floating colors, with their looseness and fluidity and their evocations of the organic patterns of nature, embody the aspect of creativity that’s natural, uncontrolled, unselfconscious … while my overlaid drawing embodies its artistic duality: more conscious, willfully formed, cognizant.

As they spread out on the water, the dense drops of color seem to open to reveal their inner structure, as if magnified under a microscope … a lens where the eye of imagination is refocused. An opening of vision into the smallness and subtlety of inner space.

For someone whose physical life is constrained and whose range in the world is limited, this sense of an inward opening is wonderfully liberating. Inside my body I find a world I can marvel at and never get to the end of, a cosmos of infinitely unfolding detail.

Spinal nerve landscape (#1), 11 x 7.75 in., Twinrocker, 2016

As I drew from the brain and spinal cord and nerves in the anatomy lab, the imagery of the floating colors guided me. It’s at that scale that their organic patterns, formed by the movement of water, correspond most closely and beautifully with the forms of anatomy. The floating drops of oil pigments and bronze powders build up to form a three-dimensional texture on my Twinrocker papers, and I work delicately on the surface, letting the brightness of the paper filter up through the interstices of the weave, to evoke the textures of flesh and bone.

Spinal nerve landscape (#3), 11 x 7.75 in.,Twinrocker, 2016

Neurons of cerebellum with floating colors, 6.5 x 4.75 in., gold Bergerac, 2013

Neural net (grey, black, red), 5.5 x 10 in., Bergerac, 2013

Arbor vitae of the cerebellum (mauve crystalline), 11 x 6.75 in., Twinrocker Yale, 2018

Rainforest forms with neurons (sacral spinal cord), 7.5 x 9.5 in., 2016-19

Dark on light with neurons (dorsal root ganglion), 9 x 12.5 in., 2016

Spinal cord butterfly with floating colors (red crystalline), 11 x 15 in., 2017

Spinal cord with floating colors (dark version), 11 x 15 in., 2017

Bluegreen kozo with motor neurons, 8.5 x 10 in., 2013

Motor neurons with floating colors (cerulean-gold), 8.5 x 11 in., 2019

As I venture deeper into inner space, my new drawings are still anchored in anatomical reality … but I’m finding a different balance between real and imagined. After all these years of drawing my spine and the complicated rotational forces bearing down on it, I trust my intuitive sense of its dynamics.

The fluidity and mobility of the floating colors bring a spiraling flow of energy into my drawings of nerve pathways.

Spinal cord closeup, soft, 7 x 5 in., 2021

Cord closeup (blue Arches), 8 x 5.75 in. on Twinrocker Rotunda, 2025

Spinal cord closeup, 11 x 7.25 in. on Twinrocker Rotunda, 2025

Spinal cord cross-section (blue cell), 8 x 10.25 in. on Moulin de Fleurac, 2025

Nerve landscape (blue indigo), 8.5 x 9.75 on Moulin de Fleurac, 2025

Nerve landscape (indigo light), 8.75 x 11.5 in. on Twinrocker Yale, 2025

More about the drawings: media, paper, etc.

Overview of all the artwork