Why SIMPLE?

As I sit here to contemplate this written entry, the word SIMPLE is subtly embedded into a cubic structure on my hooded sweatshirt. A similar block letter design happens to be on the beanie I’m wearing. Wood grain lettering is flanked by bright colors on a panel hanging above my staircase, graffiti styled letters proclaim SIMPLE as if it’s a new idea. Fancy new glow in the dark stickers are stuffed into a plastic container with various stickers of octopus, bands and coffee companies. These SIMPLE stickers are derived from a drawing I did early in college. Why has this word been such a consistent presence in my life for the last 20 years?

I was immediately enamored with graffiti upon my introduction to it in high school. A simple idea really – how cool can you make your name look? Bubble letters get a third dimension, coloring in the lines became patterns, add shading and shine for depth, curve those shapes around and add some arrows. GET NUTS. There were no limits, in fact, it wasn’t even necessary to be able to discern individual letters. I thought these artists were magicians and I wanted to make magic. I adopted the alias SIMPLISTYK, quickly shortened to SIMPLE to fit easier on a page, and decided I’d learn wild style. I would draw complicated letters that said SIMPLE, because I’m clever.

20 years later, I stick with SIMPLE as it continues to motivate me to distill the complicated nature of reality, of art, of intention, of ideas; into more digestible blocks that help make sense of existing. I like to take this known entity, the same word, the same six letters that I’m so familiar with, and see if I can do something new with it. It’s kind of like my life, my body, my consciousness, my relationships; to some extent they’re the same but as they evolve over time they continue to take on new shapes and new forms. Perhaps SIMPLE is how I actively participate in the constant on-going river of change.

I feel like SIMPLE is where my journey as an artist started. I invite you to follow my creative expression as I continue making things as a way of life.

Below: A quick travel through time starting with SIMPLISTYK in my high school era. Then, wild style gives way to the geometric style and paper gives way to digital and wearable art.

The Penrose Triangle

I’ve been painting Penrose triangles because I see them as symbolic of the intersection of imagination and science. A simple shape made impossible by a little trickery. A mathematician and an artist help us unpack a perspective of exploring the bounds of science by using metaphor and illustration.

The Penrose triangle is an “impossible shape” popularized by psychiatrist Lionel Penrose and his son, prominent Nobel Prize-winning mathematician Sir Roger Penrose. Although invention is credited to Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd, the shape is named for Penrose due to the popularity of it’s usage in the 1950’s.

Sir Roger Penrose is a fascinating person known for his research in cosmology, general relativity and (more recently) “the hard problem” of consciousness. He is half recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity."

Penrose was seeking to exhibit plain sight impossibility to describe phenomena he was studying in the theory of general relativity and it’s application in black hole theory/cosmology. In 1954 Penrose happened across an exhibition of M.C. Escher in Amsterdam. Impressed by Escher’s grasp on mathematics, and fascinated by his early illusions, Penrose and his father set to work on creating their own impossible shapes.

M.C. Escher was a Dutch graphic artist famous for his mathematical inspired creations. His 1954 exhibition that inspired Penrose likely contained works like “Drawing Hands” and “Relativity” as seen here.

Lionel and Roger Penrose set out to create the Penrose Triangle and a set of looping stairs that infinitely rise and fall. Sketches were shared with M.C. Escher who went on to use the concepts of the Penrose Triangle to create his two most famous masterpieces. “Waterfall” is also sometimes referred to as the Perpetual Motion Machine as the flowing river that turns the waterwheel continues indefinitely. “Ascending and Descending” builds on the Penrose stair concept where users could walk up or down the stairs continually, forever.

Roger Penrose often uses another M.C. Escher drawing to exhibit the properties of infinity and circular edge theory. “Circle Limit IV” is a tessellation construct showing angels and devils converging on the outer limits of their bounds. Penrose uses this analogy to describe the behavior of our universe using conformal compaction (Conformal Field Theory). From what I understand, Circle Limit III and IV were woodcut, which goes on to describe the level of talent and forsight of M.C. Escher.

I am no intellectual like Sir Roger Penrose or artist like M.C. Escher, however, I paint the Penrose triangle in homage to giants before us. I make my own original constructs of original abstract art to be colorful in your space, to be unique to your day and to remind you of how much information can be stored in a relatively simple triangle.

My current painting series is titled “Order in Abstraction” and there are original paintings available here.

Order in Abstraction

Entropy is a physical property that describes a state of disorder and the second law of thermodynamics is commonly interpreted to say that entropy always increases with time. In the book Shantaram, Abdel Khader Khan uses an Ultimate Complexity Theory to form an objective basis of morality by suggesting there is no more fundamental property of the universe that encompasses the whole of the universe for the whole of it’s history. Despite the natural tendency to disorder, humanity seems to have a compulsion to force order. We often find ourselves attracted to parallel lines in architecture, simple mathematical formulas to describe special relativity and black and white answers to complicated societal problems. We are mesmerized by the growth we see in nature, but we can’t help reduce new growth to a Fibonacci sequence. The art of Bonsai considers the master one who can patiently mimic the gentle disordered structural and functional balance of natures hand.

My latest painting series is a study of this relationship between disordered fundamental substrates and ordered subject matter. I will like to combine abstractions with some of my favorite simple shapes - triangles and cubes. These wall art pieces are designed to be beautiful in the home but also thought provoking. I want you to have something colorful and playful in your space. I want you to think about how we command abstracted forms to behave and how we feel when they don’t. Pieces in progress are commonly featured on Instagram while finished pieces will be available for sale directly through this website.

Below are some finished pieces currently available: