The Extended Mind

This series takes its name from Annie Murphy Paul’s book. Her subtitle, “The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain” is in fact what I’m attempting to do with these images. In order to explore the workings of my own creative process, I’ve created symbols and shorthand images to refer to specific thought actions. For instance, in the painting “Prat Fall” I am interested in the inversion that can occur when one mentally slips and falls, forcing a disruption, and sometimes a bruising, of world view and ego. Flat swatches of color float on canvases and are sometimes sorted into larger more organized shapes. Sometimes the drawings are arranged into groups allowing them to interact visually, at other times a single drawing becomes the composition of a piece. Externalizing these visualizations of thought helps me to play with ideas about how various thought patterns might interact.