Dennis Hollingsworth

Steve and Rudy

Painter, blogger, old friend and school mate Steve LaRose was kind to think of my work as he visited the Seattle Aquarium recently. And what is additionally wonderful is Steve's link to the work of Rudy Rucker, a mathematician, transrealist scifi writer and an achingly amateur painter who teaches at San Jose State University. The connections from science to everyday life to writing to art uses a thread of beauty that has my rapt attention.

The last time this thread was woven was Antoni Gaudi's Modernisme, a Catalan variant of the spirit of Art Nouveau. There, the earthy Catalan sensibility influenced by Viollet-le-Duc focused on structures found grown in nature as models for form in art. As the precursor of Modernism, this spirit as driven by Viollet-le-duc's imperative of honesty in design eventually became ditchedregularized or systematized into what we know as the language of High Modernism (by this I mean -more or less- something along the lines of Euclidean geometry). As evidence, I submit the work of Francis D.K. Ching, whose work provides the intellectual armature that all architecture students first build in their mental universe. There, x-y-z geometry abounds.

What Rudy's work represents for me is a possible continuation of a project interrupted, a deeper investigation into structures (paintings?) that are grown, not assembled.

Thanks, Steve!

Update:

Steve writes in:

In your most recent Ahora, it looks like the paint is running away from the vignetted spot-light on each painting.

Maybe, in the middle piece, the swarm is over-taking the light in a mob.

From this mezzanine view I begin to see it either way.

Either way, leaving the center of the square empty.

Empty for us to fill.

Or not.

Yea, I like that other Francis guy, Sam and his ""Blue Balls" too.

?Brazos, amigo!