#461 “Aterwords” 25″ x 32″ Acrylic on canvas. February, 2016

I’ve put letters and numbers in my paintings since I started painting. Sometimes prominent, sometimes almost hidden. I tend to think about these things after I do them. I had no ‘reason’ or explanation for them, but it occurs to me now that they are–more than symbolically, because they ARE symbols– emblems of what we use in our attempts to understand our universe beyond appearance: language and mathematics–fragments of our woefully incomplete understanding of ourselves, of the universe we have come to inhabit–ever so briefly.

A portrait is a powerful untruth
We are not what we look like

Nothing is