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This is the final painting I created of my Socratic Tree idea. I elaborated on much of this idea in the pastel drawing that preceded this painting. I made a couple sketches and drawings in preparation for this magnum opus.

It really is a magnum opus because it is the second biggest oil painting I’ve made thus far in my career as an artist. It’s 183 cm X 152.5 cm (or 72″ X 60″), so it is quite a large painting. It’s been in a couple of shows here in Albuquerque, so it has been seen. It just hasn’t been seen enough yet.

I completed The Socratic Tree back in 2003 right when the Bush administration was invading Iraq with the crafting of its lies about WMDs, and with the power of America’s desire to get revenge for the supposed attacks by terrorists on 9/11. I don’t want to get too political here, but this painting was a political expression at the time because I had no vocabulary to express the dissent I felt with respect to Washington’s rapacious policies.

Simultaneously, I had been listening to Art Bell’s radio show late at night in my grandparents’ basement during the cold winters in Nebraska, and he would sometimes have guests on talking about ghosts, ghost hunting, and EVP recording. The guests would sometimes discuss how children ghosts were often the most haunting.

This got me to thinking about all the lost souls, including children, who had their lives cut short because of governmental psychoses, or other reasons. I wanted to give all the children of misfortune in the realms of limbo surrounding earth a voice. So, naturally, I decided that their voices could be expressed through a painting of dissent against war.

I incorporated a lot of different media into this painting, including: bathroom caulk, pieces of cardboard, toilet paper, staples, some old cloth from a gunnie sack for flour, chips of old oil paint, acrylic, and a little bit of spackle mixed in with the acrylic caulk.

The caulk composes the main trunk of the tree. I did this to create a relief effect, while not using loads of oil paint to compose the body. It worked pretty well, and I was able to paint oil paint over the caulk.

Here are the left and the right sides positioned next to each other as a diptych. This is how I originally envisioned this project. I wanted to bring attention to the contrast of night and day, while unifying these times with a continuous landscape.

I hadn’t combined these two paintings together digitally up until now. I hope that the viewer can see the split in harmony, and the harmony in conflict. Being indoctrinated into a reality that relies on duality to survive, I made a creative project out of this perception.

It is a visual aphorism that speaks to the mind through an image that can transcend words. Without saying more, please enjoy!

This is the first drawing I ever made of The Socratic Tree. I didn’t title this drawing with that title originally, as I had not even considered a title for it. I made this drawing back in 1991 when I was first growing into an awakened awareness of what art really meant to me.

I had been experiencing some throes of depression and heartbreak over a girl I was infatuated with, so I made a few works of art pertaining to this sort of dark night depressive state.

I tried to put a crow in Times of Opposition–which also depicts The Socratic Tree on the left side of that diptych–but it blended in with the night sky too much, so you can’t see it. You can, however, see the crow here in this picture. I know that crows don’t fly at night, but moon is shining, so, perhaps the bird is a raven.

This piece, yet another electronic hybrid, was derived from my painting called Of Which I Am a Part. I’ve been wanting to integrate some of my mandelic art works into hybridized amalgamations. You saw some of these attempts in Concomitant Comets within this album.

Before using the circular designs within this image for the material for a new hybridized image, I decided to just work out some of the issues I had with the original painting. Here is the original painting as a short-cut for you to compare real quick: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=216914361667200&set=a.216695921689044.60872.171452642880039&type=3&theater

Part of the left hand side of the original painting feels like it’s missing. Originally, I actually intended that effect, as I wanted the viewer to feel like he or she was looking at a mandelic design more closely. In this image you see here, you can now feel like you have stepped back, and can enjoy the fertile space surrounding the center of interest.

I also added some extra dimension with dark hues of blacks, violets, and blues. This gives the image an effect of looking at some alien construct up in the night sky. There is also a mesh of wire-like constructions connecting the junctions of the design together, which gives the visual representation of a network.

While mandalas are a common theme in many forms of art throughout history, I haven’t been able to find any done quite in the style that I create my own personal mandalas in. I want to share with you this style that I’ve been working on for practically my whole life so as to touch the keys on your soul like a strange, never-seen-before musical instrument.

While I did post a similar image here, the original piece that was part of the material that I used for this piece is called Lunar Equipment, and it can be seen a few posts earlier to this one. I felt that the moths didn’t have enough space to fly around in, and this inspired me to make another piece in which there is more depth, layering, materials, and space incorporated herein.

I also broke the individual spaces that each moth was flying in from the original piece and adjusted their bearing so that they look like they aren’t flying perfectly in ninety degree angles from each other.

I put a glowing circular shape slightly off center to the upper right in order to give more dimension to the world of moths, as moths have tendencies to fly wildly around sources of light, circling around, and around, and around. Almost like lunatics.

You can still make out some of the text that was applied as a layer to the original image transversing the moths in their individual spaces. I think the text is relevant, in a way, as it suggests for people to question, and argue with their opponents, or sources of authority, instead of just obeying, and blindly circling around supposed sources of power without any critical thinking.

This version is a derivative of the Calyces series. Calyces is the plural form of calyx, and calyx means cup in Latin. Poiesis means a condition or state of creation. I learned of the word poiesis when I was learning some medical terminology extracted from the word hematopoiesis, which means the production of red blood cells from the marrow of bones.

There are simple shapes in this series that resemble cups, and it looks like an elaborate assembly line producing cups from a mythological manufacturing plant.

The original drawing was produced back in 2009 when I was working at Convergys. It was just black and white drawing, but I was able to to hyperbolize some color out of it through some digital filters after scanning it into the computer.

This image is made to be a print, and can easily be matted and framed. It’s a great image to have in a kitchen, or a bathroom, or a bedroom.

I was also thinking this image, and my other mosaic images, would be great as floor designs in atriums of museums, as main floors within custodial banks, or as wall designs on major hospital walls. I was also thinking that some laser technology integrated into a projector could be used to help slightly burn an image into a wall, floor, or area as a template in preparation for the work in filling out the design with whatever materials required to complete the project.