Late 2019 I came upon a collection of industry journals tailored towards the study of gemstones. It was this quarterly publication called Gem and Gemology Magazine - It was full of dry articles about refraction, clarity, industry news and mineral discoveries around the world. What stood out to me however were the printed images. I’ve collected found images my entire adult life and if I see something I like I keep it. I went through 60 years worth of the periodical during the first lockdown. Occupied with the horror of the pandemic, I saved the images and didn’t revisit them for nearly five years. When I did eventually go digging into the collection, I was struck by how the images looked like blended up New York School paintings from the late 50s - this lined up well with catalogues I was revisiting at the time.

The images that stood out were taken using a technique called Thin-section Petrography - Geologist cut thin slices of rock and minerals and polish them down thinner than a hair, they shine polarized light under a microscope to study the composition of the materials. A practical technique which produces images as intricate as photos of deep space.

The similarities between the photographs of these mineral worlds and images produced by observing far away galaxies scratched at a truth that I hold close - The observable world in its entirety follows a behavior and design that spirals out from the smallest of things. Reality has an interior - like a spirit living in a body, there is something dynamic and undying inside.

I made contact with a geologist at CUNY New Paltz and was generously invited to come use the laboratory - after a brief demonstration I spent the day generating microscopic images of rocks. I took one of the photos from that day and made a painting called John Candy.

Now John Candy was the first famous person I remember knowing was dead. He died in his sleep at a hotel in Durango Mexico in 94 while filming a movie called Wagon Train. He was often cast as the sympathetic ordinary, or the fool, and was a disarming feature in films - He served as relief and levity or a chaotic force to be reckoned with. His face and voice hang on the laths of my inner child’s mind.

When thinking about what metaphors appear between the interior of all things and reality at large, I found it natural to think of him. If you’re painting from a photograph of a hidden world you are framing something essentially unseeable. When you bring to mind the memory of someone gone you’re doing something similar. if there is an interior to all material things then could there be an interior to the immaterial such as the living memory of a dead man?

The fun is asking a painting to be a metaphor for the soul of a rock and in the same breath an avatar for the soul of a man.