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

Nue. Bare. Unadorned. Without colour's armour.

Where the other works in the Nudibranch series arrive in full chromatic declaration — neon green, electric yellow, deep black, blazing fuchsia — Nudi Fungi Nue whispers. And in whispering, reveals something the louder paintings cannot.

This is the fungi kingdom undressed. Stripped of its most dramatic pigments, returned to the palette of the forest floor in winter, of the inside of a shell, of skin and bone and the particular warm neutrality of things that grow in the dark without anyone watching. Cream and blush and dusty rose and the faintest lavender. Brown that is almost amber. White that is almost light. The warm gold of the raw wood panel breathing through every gap between the elements like the forest floor itself — present, grounding, alive.

And the forms. Without the distraction of extreme colour, the forms become everything.

The oyster mushroom in the lower left unfurls in a spiral of extraordinary architectural precision — each gill radiating outward from the centre with a mathematical regularity that has no business being this beautiful and yet is. Bottom right, a pink oyster mushroom cluster spreads its pleated, fan-like caps in a composition of such delicate complexity that it looks less like a fungus and more like a Renaissance garment, each fold considered, each edge precise. The trio of white ghost mushrooms rises from a base of coral pink brain fungus in the centre — elegant, minimal, their smooth caps and slender stems the still point around which all the textural richness of the composition turns.

Above them, the gill shots. Fan-shaped caps photographed from below, their radial gill structures exposed — each one a different expression of the same fundamental geometry, from the tightly packed pink gills of the upper right to the looser, more generous spacing of the upper centre. These are the hidden faces of fungi — the surfaces most people never see because they require the mushroom to be turned over, examined, held up to the light with genuine curiosity. The artist has always had that curiosity. This painting is the evidence.

The crystals appear throughout — smoky quartz in the upper right, amethyst in the lower left, rose quartz fragments scattered through the composition — their mineral clarity a beautiful counterpoint to the soft organic forms of the fungi. Crystal and fungus. The geological and the biological. The ancient and the seasonal. All of it against the warm gold wood, all of it sealed under resin, all of it glowing with the particular quiet luminosity of things that don't need to shout.

Nudi Fungi Nue is the most meditative, most intimate, most quietly extraordinary piece in the series. It is the painting for someone who looks carefully. Who slows down. Who finds in the understated the same wonder that others find only in the spectacular.

They are not wrong to look here. The spectacular was always in the details.

✦ Original, one-of-a-kind work ✦ Photo collage 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