I can’t sculpt, can’t climb the scaffold, or twist the wire, or hold the fragile optic with only one hand, on account of my bum left arm and wrist.  But I can type one-handed.

Let me take this opportunity to type, one-handed from the studio, beginning with a photo collection I’ve been maintaining for a few years that I call Looks Like.  To my continuing amazement, I frequently find a picture or view of natural phenomena that looks like a piece of art I have already made.  It confounds me. You’ll have to take my Joan of Arc word for it.  I ran the collection by a couple of artist friends who thought I should share it.  I countered that it would make me look crazy, and both of them assured me I already do.  These are unaltered photos.

Looks Like

 the Venus Transit,

venustransit

which I watched from the Adler Planetarium, eerily brought a recent painting moment to life when the brush jumped and made a mark on my orange field several weeks before the transit

                                                                                                                          DMajor score painting

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I was fairly amazed to find this picture of lighting at an Icelandic volcano:

eyjafjallajokullvolcanolightningiceland

     DMajorIphegeniaFalls

 some short time after finishing this painting, which I then titled to match my attempt to pronounce the volcano’s name, Iphegenia Falls

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Current Z

The story of Current Z inspired me to formalize Looks Like by keeping the images in a folder instead my head.  I had just finished photographing a piece that arrived so fast I felt hot-wired by Muse for 9 hours. When I finally sat down on the floor to organize the photos, the laptop slipped, and in a crazy bumbling ballet of keyboard and falling, by chance or by magic, my fingertips managed to save the photos, and name the folder ‘current z’  no caps, thank heavens.  I decided to investigate the term, and bumped into this lab image measuring electromagnetic phenomenon that creates auroras – and its track-stopping similarity to the shadow cast by the object I had just created.  This incident also supported my growing curiosity about the shadows my work was casting.   here’s the object, current z.

current z object DMajor

             and a detail shot of its shadow

current Z

and the lab photo I peeled off the internet so it’s tiny:

current z experiment

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this studio snapshot of some prior mesh sculpture

 screen work DMajor                        481px-Verhulst-Mandelbrot-Bifurcation

came to mind when i bumped into these graphic renderings of the Mandelbrot sequence.

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playing around with iPhoto’s x-ray look on an enlarged photo of the wire knot mass of a 2011 installation,

DanaMajor xray view wire             neurons

                                                       I was not subtly reminded of neurons

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here’s a snapshot of one of the earliest Shadow Matrixes, titled Blind Spot for reasons of its own.

 blind spot                                             microscopy image of optic nerve

later, I google image searched blind spot and found this image of an eye with a blind spot

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when I saw the SEM image I was lucky to be able to take myself at the GSU microscopy lab of goat hoof,

goat hoof under microscope           DMajor Score Painting VI

                                                                  I thought of a recently-finished painting

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this Sasquatch-sighting-quality snapshot shows my screen with the fractal rendering in front of the painting it reminds me of:

mythologist looks like fractals rendered too

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I used to make porcelain sculptures, and when i saw this image of a solar flare

solar flare    sea box DMajor

                                         I thought of this little 2005 porcelain piece.  note the gold dot repeating as well…

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thank you for visiting the carnival trailer, watch your step, and have a nice day