Photo Collage, Acrylic and Resin on Wood Panel | 12×12 inches | 1⅞" Deep | 2023 | Nudibranch Series

Look up.

That is what the mushroom is asking you to do. Look up — the way you look up inside a cathedral, the way your neck tilts back involuntarily when something above you is so extraordinary that your body responds before your mind catches up. The gill structure of this mushroom, photographed from directly below, is one of the most perfect geometric forms the natural world has ever produced — radiating outward from its pale centre in precise, mathematically flawless lines, blue-white against deep purple, a rose window made of fungus, a mandala that no human hand drew, a cathedral ceiling that grew in the dark without anyone watching.

It is the still point of Nudi Fuschia. The eye of a storm of extraordinary colour and crystal and creature that swirls around it in every direction.

The amethyst dominates — and amethyst has always dominated. One of the most beloved crystals in human history, worn by Egyptian pharaohs and medieval bishops and contemporary healers alike, its purple the colour of twilight and ceremony and the particular quality of consciousness that exists at the edge of sleep. Here it appears in every form — raw clusters shooting upward like purple flames, faceted points catching the fuchsia light and throwing it back as violet and lavender and deep wine, broken fragments revealing their interior geometry in cross-section. The whole upper portion of the composition is a cathedral of amethyst — and beneath it, rising through it, that perfect mushroom gill mandala holds its impossible centre.

Against all that purple — fuchsia. The background blazes in hot pink with the same unambiguous commitment that Nudi Jaune blazed in yellow and Nudi Neon Green Icy blazed in green. This is a series that does not whisper its colours. It announces them. And fuchsia against amethyst purple is an announcement of the highest order — the warm against the cool, the electric against the crystalline, the painted surface against the geological depth.

And then the nudibranch. Bottom right, ruffled and dramatic in pink and black — a dorid nudibranch whose mantle edge ripples in precise folds like the hem of an extraordinary garment, its colouring a perfect echo of the fuchsia and purple world it inhabits. It could have been designed for this composition. It was designed by four hundred million years of evolution — which amounts to the same thing.

A blue lapis chunk anchors the left in deep cobalt. A sea anemone offers its soft organic presence against the hard geometry of the crystals. A small white mushroom stands below its magnificent gill-displaying companion with the quiet dignity of something that knows it is in the presence of greatness and is entirely comfortable with that.

Through the resin — through that glass-like surface that gives every element the depth and luminosity of something subaquatic, something preserved, something glimpsed through the wall of an aquarium or the face of a jewel — all of it glows. The amethyst. The fuchsia. The mandala. The nudibranch. All of it, permanently and completely alive.

✦ Original, one-of-a-kind work ✦ Photo collage, acrylic and resin on wood panel ✦ 12 × 12 inches | 1⅞" deep ✦ Unframed — deep cradled panel, ready to hang ✦ 2023 ✦ Part of the Nudibranch series ✦ Free worldwide shipping