To make an interesting painting, you have to break a few... spines?

A few years ago, I became really interested in exploring the spine. I think we're pretty used to imagery of the organs inside the human body - as much as we can, we identify to some degree with this imagery. But it's much harder to connect to cells.. Cells are very small, harder to map to our body image or body functions and, individually, are much less consequential than whole organs. 


The nervous system inhabits an interesting in-between existence,being a distributed system of lesser-known small organs and structures (except for the brain),  it may feel as a bit abstract or less substantial tissue,... So the "rule of thumb" of the spine comes as a surprise. The spine is roughly the width of the thumb. My spine is roughly the size of my thumb. So is yours. That's pretty substantial. And many cells of your spine while still very small actually run the full length of your body. 


This "Spine", is my spine. And if you’re my height, than it’s pretty similar to yours too.

55 x 16 in, oil on canvas, 2006.

After this piece, I continued to explore the many parts of the body. Recently I decided to revisit this theme as part of a series that was more "full bodied"- that represented more of a whole shadow of my body.

I did some research and collected a lot of anatomical references. I became particularly interested in including the gut brain. The gut brain is more literal than we may think: we have a network of neurons around our intestines that seem to influence our health and mood. Scientists are still puzzling out their role but one thing is certain, the expression "gut feeling" just got a whole lot more real. Check out this awesome article on the topic from Scientific American: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gut-second-brain

Below is the beginning of the new piece. I took a photograph of me and blew it up onto the canvas. Part of the process then involved trying to place this body system in my own "shadow":

54 x 32 in, oil on canvas, 2011.

While it was really wonderful to paint the nerves as a line pattern, the final result was too close to a standard illustration. So I "broke" it a bit:

This was more fun, but still very literal.. it needed to be "broken" again. The idea behind the piece was to explore the spine as a part of the human body, a determinant of individual identity. Who are we, from the perspective of the nervous system? How are we re-defined if all we know, including the sensory information that grounds us in the present, the memory of the past and what we project for the future exists in large part (some say completely) in the nervous system? If this nervous system both contains a very self-involved program (us, yay!) and many mechanisms that constantly check the outside world? Maybe this exploration should go fully beneath the skin and let the rest of body become part of the outside world.

So, this is the latest iteration:

In this iteration, the spine and nervous system are abstracted out of the body, with scratches, lines and paint strokes going both ways between it and the "other," the outside and the rest of the body.

This is the lombar (low back) part of the spine.

This is the base of the brain.