1. The vertical marks offer a visual language.
The silver/white strokes read initially as tree trunks, but they are not really trunks in any literal sense. They are events—vertical interruptions in the earth-colored field. Some are substantial and almost architectural; others dissolve into the surface.

That creates a tension between presence and absence: some trees are there, yet some only barely enough to be recognized.

2. The ground is doing as much work as the “trees.”
The brown-gray surface is wonderfully active. The tiny black/brown inclusions, green fragments, scratches and irregularities prevent the painting from becoming a conventional landscape. It feels almost geological and generative. the green both describes and activates the vegetation. It is scattered throughout the surface, so that the painting seems alive rather than illustrated.

3. The silver is used for effect.
The silver verticals introduce something almost numinous…spiritual. They aren’t simply highlights; they seem to emerge from another register of the painting.

Depending on the light, they could be: trees, rain, reflections, or traces of something that has disappeared,

There is also a subtle conflict between vertical order and horizontal/organic disorder.

The trunks establish a rhythm:

| | | | | | |

The surface underneath them disrupts or refuses that order.

That creates a kind of push-pull—not unlike Hofmann’s plasticity, although here the push-pull is quieter. The verticals try to establish structure while the field continually breaks structure apart.

I think of this painting as using “gestural restraint” where I am not filling the canvas completely with ink. Rather each gesture has a space around it, allowing fewer gestures to complete an established field.

The trees aren’t hierarchical. There isn’t a heroic central tree. There isn’t a picturesque focal point. Instead, there is a community of vertical presences. In other words, this painting doesn’t organize nature around a single dominant object. It gives us a field of beings.

And perhaps most importantly, the painting doesn’t dictate what the swamp is. That gets very close to the question that I like to address:

How little form is necessary before the viewer begins to participate in making the image?

This work pushes against landscape representation and pulls toward a field of matter. I think of it as The physics of painting.

It is the digital filtering that changes the piece substantially. The filtered version is not simply a prettier or more intensified version of the first. It becomes almost a different ontological state of the same image.

1. The surface is the subject

In the original, there is a sparse field with vertical presences emerging from it. Here, the entire surface has become microscopic, cellular, almost particulate. It is interstitial, giving a complex pattern, abstracted, yet formulated. I ask the viewer to work, to translate:

tree from ground

bark from foliage

foreground from background

figure from atmosphere.

When I exercise at the gym, I listen to my books on tape… about cosmic dust, fields of energy quantas and relationship events (like the ripples) in the quantum fields. How photons create an emergent burst….

In reading Hinton on Chan Buddhism and Taoism, I often think of absence to emergence and back to absence, the qi and its relationships to the cosmos.

In Kabbalistic terms, the Hebrew letter Ayin takes on similar attributes. In Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), Ayin represents profound spiritual “nothingness” and reminds us of the ultimate, hidden reality of the Divine before creation, something ungraspable. It is contrasted with Yesh, which means “something” or “existence”. (Wikipedia)

In these two paintings I am using visual language to communicate these ideas. I am using both analogue and digital visual language.

The digital image is especially keen in speaking about how small differentiated events look distinct when viewed from varying distances, yet all are connected and none exists entirely by itself.

2. The trees survive the transformation—whether in digital or analogue language.

Notice how the filter has not erased the vertical structures.

They remain unmistakable enough to organize the field, but they have become much less literal. The pale trunks now seem almost like veins, nervous-system pathways, or columns of light.

And another key feature of this painting is that surprisingly, small amounts of recognizable form can hold together an enormous amount of abstraction.

3. The bright colors add a dimension of moving the viewers eye around the painting.

The original’s muted earth/green/silver palette feels contemplative.

The digitalization pink-orange field, acid greens, blue fragments and lavender whites create complementary tensions everywhere. There is very little visual rest. That changes the emotional register.

The original says, to me: “Enter quietly.”

This one says— field of matter/energy.

4. One persistent criticism I get….

In some paintings, I introduce so much information that restraint has been lost.

In the first image, I am giving the viewer more relatively quiet spaces. In the digitalized image almost every square inch is an intentional act of communicating.

The surface is so active, it reduces it to visual equality: no hierarchy, everything has the same volume.

Yet, in comparing the analogue (the ink on rice paper painting) to the digital (the ink painting plus a digital filter) I have set up a dialogue and a dialectic between the highly worked and the withheld.

5. The digital filter does something conceptually valuable

By adding a digital filter, it functions more like a second act of seeing.

The digital version makes the trees look as though they are emerging from matter rather than standing in matter. We are looking at more interstitial relationships, at a micro level, which gives us a different perspective.

The first asks “Can I make a tree without really painting a tree?” The filtered one asks a more radical question:

“Can a landscape dissolve into matter and still remain a landscape?”

As we move into the Jewish New Year, my thoughts turn to Kol Israel and to the frightening times in which we are living. Across many democracies, Jews are experiencing a resurgence of violent and virulent antisemitism. The hatred of Jews has not disappeared from the world; it has once again found new political forms, new languages, and new permission. I cannot enter this New Year without acknowledging that fear and without mourning the lives of Jews who have been killed simply because they were Jews.

My heart also remains filled with anguish over October 7, 2023—the horrific Hamas attack on communities in southern Israel that murdered approximately 1,200 people and took hundreds hostage. The deliberate murder, rape and kidnapping of civilians was an atrocity, and nothing can justify it. The grief of Israeli families, the trauma of survivors, and the suffering of the hostages and their families must not be diminished or forgotten.

And yet, Jewish mourning cannot require me to close my eyes to the suffering of Palestinians.

I am profoundly disappointed and heartsick over the Israeli government’s conduct of the war in Gaza and the continuation of the occupation. In the name of security and revenge, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. Families have been shattered, children have been killed, homes and communities destroyed, and an entire population has endured displacement, hunger, fear, and profound humiliation. By 2026, the reported Palestinian death toll had risen well beyond the 60,000 deaths that once seemed almost unimaginable.

I cannot accept the proposition that Jewish safety can be secured through the destruction or dehumanization of another people. Nor can I accept the idea that criticism of the Israeli government’s policies is antisemitic. To oppose antisemitism and to oppose cruelty toward Palestinians are not contradictory commitments. For me, they arise from the same moral imperatives: the refusal to treat any human being as disposable and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

What troubles me most is the growing power of religious fundamentalism and authoritarian nationalism. Too many political leaders continue to perpetuate cycles of war and violence, appealing to fear, tribalism, religious absolutism, and patriarchal authority to build powerful constituencies. They promise security while directing enormous public resources toward militarization and war. They encourage us to see our neighbors as enemies and our differences as threats.

This is not the future I want.

The lessons of Jewish history should make us profoundly suspicious of absolute power, authoritarianism, and the dehumanization of the Other. Judaism contains within it a powerful tradition of argument, questioning, ethical responsibility, and resistance to idolatry—including the idolatry of political power. The shofar calls us not simply to remember, but to awaken.

Rosh Hashanah asks us to look inward: What have we done? What have we failed to do? Where have we become hardened? Where have we allowed fear to replace compassion?

As we enter another year, I pray for a Judaism—and a world—that can hold grief without turning grief into vengeance; that can defend Jews and Israel without denying Palestinians their humanity and a homeland; that can resist antisemitism without becoming blind to injustice; and that can seek security without sacrificing compassion.

May this New Year bring us the courage to reject the politics of hatred, violence, domination, and perpetual war. May we refuse the seduction of authoritarian power, wherever it appears. And may we remember that the preservation of one people’s humanity can never require the destruction of another’s.

L’shanah tovah.

May the coming year be a year of awakening, justice, compassion, and peace.

A boundary doesn’t merely contain a thing. It helps determine the form of its possible states.

At the smallest scales, what we call “form” is not necessarily a visible shape. It is a structured set of possible states, relationships, transitions, and probabilities.

Im thinking of the relationship of particles and quantum fields. Sometimes this level of analysis provides insights to my art, to the spiritual side of life, to the idea of relativity.

A boundary that looks fundamental at one scale can disappear at another.

One factor of this relationship is that seeing is always a matter of perspective.

There may be no privileged place from which we simply see reality itself. We construct different descriptions according to the distinctions we’re making.

That doesn’t mean “everything is subjective.” A measurement has constraints imposed by the physical world. But what counts as a particle, a boundary, a form, or even a separate object can depend upon the level and framework from which we are describing it.

In deciphering forms and patterns, one could argue that forms are what certain patterns look like when viewed from a particular scale and perspective.

And “in always becoming”, there are implications of transformation, to this point, it isn’t necessarily “one thing becoming another thing.” It can be a reorganization that, from our perspective, appears as the emergence of a different form.

My recent series of abstract ink paintings on rice paper emerges from an ongoing engagement with the Florida wetlands—not simply as recognizable landscapes, but as dynamic fields of energy, movement, transformation, and interrelationship. Rather than depicting a particular place, I seek to evoke the experience of being within a living system whose processes exceed what can be fully seen or understood.

The work begins in meditation. I approach the paper without a predetermined image or conventional sketch. Meditation becomes a threshold through which the painting can emerge. I allow my attention to settle while remaining receptive to gesture, rhythm, accident, and intuition. My process moves between conscious intention and subconscious action.

I work with ink and water on rice paper, responding to the absorbency and fragility of the surface. The paper does not simply receive the mark; it participates in its formation. Ink spreads, pools, penetrates, stains, feathers, and sometimes escapes the control of the brush. I work rapidly and gesturally, drawing upon an action-painting approach in which the movement of the body becomes part of the work. I am less interested in recording the drama of the gesture than in entering a state of heightened attention in which gesture becomes a form of listening.

The painting develops through an exchange between intention and contingency. The work becomes a conversation between what I intend and what the material reveals. The unexpected is often where the painting begins to disclose its deeper possibilities.

David Hinton’s writings on Tao, Ch’an, and Chinese landscape painting have also profoundly influenced my approach. His emphasis on the interpenetration of form and emptiness offers a way of understanding the wetland not as a fixed object but as a process of becoming. In my paintings, emptiness is not simply the unpainted portion of the paper. It is an active presence—a field through which forms emerge, dissolve, and remain connected. The white of the rice paper can suggest mist, water, atmosphere, distance, or an opening into what cannot be named.

This connects with my interest in qi: movement, breath, energy, and transformation. The brush becomes an extension of breath. A stroke carries the movement of the body into the surface, while water carries the ink beyond the limits of the initial gesture. What appears to be a static image is therefore the residue of movement. The painting records a process rather than a fixed state.

My engagement with Theodor W. Adorno introduces a critical dimension. Adorno’s aesthetics resists reducing art to predetermined meaning or straightforward representation. His concept of nonidentity—the recognition that an object always exceeds the concepts imposed upon it—resonates with my desire to allow these paintings to remain unresolved. I want the work to preserve something of nature’s resistance to conceptual mastery. The wetland is fragile and persistent, visible and hidden, ordered and unpredictable. The paintings attempt to inhabit those contradictions. The absorbent rice paper, fluid ink, movement of water, limitations of the brush, and accidents of drying are not merely techniques for producing an image. They are part of the work’s meaning. Material process becomes a form of thought.

The wetland thus becomes both subject and method. Its shifting boundaries are mirrored by the painting process itself. Ink disperses as water moves through the paper; forms emerge from washes and gestures; each mark alters the meaning of those that came before it. Nothing remains entirely fixed. Each painting becomes an accumulation of decisions, accidents, pauses, and responses—a record of constant becoming.

I am increasingly interested in the possibility that abstraction can bring us closer to ecological reality than representation sometimes can. A recognizable landscape tells us what a place looks like. Abstraction can suggest how a place behaves: how energies circulate, boundaries shift, matter transforms, and visible forms arise from processes that remain largely invisible.

Through meditation, gesture, material contingency, and abstraction, I seek a visual language in which presence can arise from absence, form from formlessness, and stillness from movement.

Ultimately, these paintings are meditations on becoming. The wetland is continually becoming; the painting is continually becoming; and so is the consciousness that encounters it. I am not attempting to capture a landscape, but to participate in its unfolding.

I’m tired now.

old enough

to hear my joints

before I hear the morning birds.

The theater of politics

has become another room

filled with men

certain of themselves,

Competing, raising their voices

as if volume and drones

could redeem their domineering history.

Many days

I’d rather slip away

from the relentless gravity.

Years ago

I stood towards the wind.

Now,

thank God,

there are younger voices,

new shoulders

willing to carry the banner;

a resurgence of dissent,

the beautiful refusal

to surrender.

Let them argue

with the emperors.

My work

is elsewhere now.

I enter the studio

where the clay releases what my mind

remembers.

The brush teaches silence.

Words become lyrical

lanterns

against the dark.

The twelve-string

opens the room

like sunlight through trees.

The six-string

holds the quieter conversations.

Even the kitchen

is a kind of prayer—

apricots,

ginger,

bread,

fire,

the alchemy

of ordinary things.

This is where

I still recognize myself.

Not in the shouting.

Not in certainty.

But in the hand

that follows

what it cannot yet name.

Here,

where imagination

is freer than power,

where I pray that, only the cosmic

authority can command

the next brushstroke,

I am,

at last. 

Our brains, the wetlands, all matter, are not separate from the cosmos. They are the cosmos folded into living tissue. The atoms that compose our bodies and the swamp were forged in ancient stars. evolution assembled our minds into neurons, and experience continually reshapes their connections. Consciousness is not an intrusion upon nature from the outside, but one of its emergent expressions. Each mind is a local eddy in the universe’s continuous flow—a temporary configuration of matter and energy through which the cosmos briefly becomes aware of itself. Perception, imagination, memory, and art are not departures from the natural world but further unfoldings of its generative capacities.

Nothing in existence is fixed. Every entity is suspended within an ongoing process of becoming. We, as individuals, are continuously remade: cells regenerate, neural pathways reorganize, memories are revised, identities evolve. Humanity itself is a species in transition, shaped by biological evolution, culture, technology, and our ever-changing relationships with one another and with the Earth. Galaxies likewise are dynamic systems—stars and planets are born, transform, then die returning their elements to the interstellar galaxies, where new stars and planets emerge. The universe as a whole expands, transforms and generates new structures; the process is one of always Becoming.  Existence is less a collection of stable objects than an unfolding continuum of processes, relations, and transformations.

In this view, painting is not the representation of a finished world but participation in its continual emergence. Each mark records a moment in an unfinished process, where absence gives rise to presence and presence dissolves again into possibility. The image is never completely resolved because reality itself is never complete. The forest, the body, the galaxy, and consciousness all arise from the same ceaseless movement of matter, energy, and relationship. Art can make this movement visible—not by freezing it into certainty, but by allowing viewers to experience the living tension between formation and dissolution, order and openness, presence and the inexhaustible field from which it and we continually emerge.

The Barbarians Have Been Called
They come wearing many flags,
many scriptures,
many uniforms,
many languages—
yet always carrying
the same mission to dominate, to wage battles, torpedo and plunder the people.
They raid the homes of immigrants
before dawn.
Settlers drive families
from ancient hills and call possession
their God’s promise.
They proclaim themselves
freedom fighters,
holy warriors,
liberators,
while innocent women and children are excluded from the tunnels, where only the warriors are protected. The women and children are ravaged by their brutality.
Leaving only the grammar of grief.
These barbarian patriarchal leaders and their sycophantic politicians, preachers, and billionaires are raping, killing, or veiling women and girls—it is a learned hatred of “the other.”

The Barbarians march beneath medals,
maps, and empire,
And compete by sending the young
to die for their very old ambitions.
They praise hardness,
muscle,
obedience,
And mistaken cruelty
for strength.
Every age invents
its own barbarians.
Every age finds leaders paid by the billionaires
willing to summon them.
And always,
it is the innocent
who pay the price:
the child beneath rubble,
the mother searching names,
the old man carrying
the dead.
God—
if there are angels
still walking this earth,
we need them now.
Stand between
the hand and the weapon,
the order and the bullet,
the hatred
and the human heart.
Teach us,
before another generation is buried,
that no victory
built upon innocent lives
has ever been a victory at all.

The forests burn. The smoke
enters our lungs.

The billionaires
hire the barbarians.

The politicians
guard their gates.The patriarchs
call it order.

The cypress
calls it forgetting.

The rivers remember. The ash remembers. Every empire falls.

And The earth remains.

What we call emptiness
is crowded with beginnings.

Dark enigma
is not darkness
but the hidden generosity
of the unseen.

Stars dissolve
into dust.

Dust dreams itself
into forests,
birds,
human hands,
and poems.

Painting and poetry do not represent reality; they make visible the invisible currents—qi, Shekinah, the Tao’s movement, the hidden field from which forms emerge.

The observer is not outside the cosmos but one expression of its unfolding awareness. Seeing is itself an event within the field.

Matter is the appearance of deeper energetic and spiritual processes. The Tao, Ein Sof, and quantum fields each point toward a reality that exceeds perception.

To see is to reflect—

to gather knowledge,

to approach an understanding

of the other.

Trees,

birds in flight,

flora and fauna:

all stand beyond us,

more than our names for them.

Social structures,

concepts,

and inherited certainties

cannot fully account

for how or why things are.

The ego seeks identity,

a fixed and certain world.

Yet greed,

ignorance,

dissonance,

and bias

leave us perpetually incomplete.

Poetry,

music,

and painting

open another way of seeing.

Ink and water

moving across ragged rice paper

become a lyrical field,

teaching us the materiality of things,

the conundrums and dialectics

of a cosmos forever becoming.

We stand within it

and at its threshold—

seeing,

becoming,

and seeing again.

Kandel explains why the mind must identify. Adorno explains why wisdom requires remembering that identification is never complete.

The brain survives by categorizing. Adorno’s aesthetics attempt to keep us attentive to everything that escapes the category.

1. Fear / disconnection / field

fear enters here—

mind drifting from the qi

cosmic field remains

fear passes through me

a mind loosened from its root

cosmic field, still whole

fear, a brief shadow—

mind strays from breathing qi

field without rupture

2. Night / opening / arising

silent night deepens—

cosmic fields opening wide

qi begins to rise

in the silent night

the ten thousand things open—

qi moving through all

night without a sound—

vast fields quietly opening

qi, already here

3. Stars / moon / awakening

meditating stars—

moonlight enters the heart-field

qi awakening

under watching stars

moonlight touches hidden ground—

qi stirs from within

stars, no separation—

moonlight in the body’s field

qi, waking as one

marsh grasses whisper

wind moving through what was first—

source without a name

stars in still water

ancestral dark breathing through

reeds, mud, and my pulse

The instability of nature and our perceptions

For Adorno, he approaches nature within a philosophy of aesthetics .

When you stand before a landscape—or a painting of one—you immediately begin organizing what you see into concepts: tree, flower, forest, springtime, beauty. This is what Adorno calls identifying thought. Concepts allow us to navigate the world, but they also distort it because no concept ever fully captures the thing itself.

The “unstable event of perceiving nature” occurs when perception exceeds those concepts.

A tree is never simply “a tree.” The actual tree possesses an irreducible particularity—its texture, history, relation to light, weather, soil, and surrounding life. The concept tree is necessary, but it leaves something out. Adorno calls this remainder the non-identical.

Theodor W. Adorno argues that authentic art can momentarily reveal this gap between concept and reality. In my paintings, An oscillating experience happens when we go from

“Those are blossoms.”

Then the blossoms dissolve into color.

“Those are trees.”

Then the trees become stains, brushstrokes, and atmosphere.

“This is a landscape.”

Then it becomes an abstract field.

The eye oscillates.

That oscillation is important because the painting prevents conceptual closure. You never fully arrive at “what it is.”

Adorno would say the work preserves the object’s non-identity instead of forcing it into complete intelligibility.

Nature as a Promise

For Adorno, modern people rarely encounter nature innocently. Nature is already mediated by culture, memory, science, economics, photography, tourism, and language. When we look at a forest, we do not see “pure nature.” We see nature through accumulated concepts.

Yet nature continues to suggest something beyond those concepts.

He sometimes describes this as nature’s promise—not a specific message, but an intimation that reality exceeds the social systems through which we organize it.

The lavender painting creates this effect. The flowers are present enough to evoke a field or garden, but absent enough to remain elusive. The image hovers between recognition and disappearance.

For Adorno, that hovering matters because it preserves mystery, and engages the viewer, without turning it into mysticism.