Universe Within

Over the past year, my family found ourselves navigating unfamiliar territory when my youngest son, Leo, was diagnosed with epilepsy and FND.

I did what I tend to do when I don't understand something: I became hyper focused and completely consumed by going down various rabbitholes of information, trying to better understand. I disappeared for months into books, research papers, podcasts on neurology, movement disorders, seizures, and consciousness. 

The more EEG's, imaging and testing the doctors did, the more questions I had.

And somewhere in all of that searching, I became fascinated by how little we still understand about the human brain. When I finally sat down to paint and externalize everything this is what emerged.

Universe Within.

Serindipitious things occured while I was  working on painting this one. My oldest son, Easton and I went and saw The Life of Chuck, which explores a similar concept in a King way.

Then, about a week later, I was reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and came across one of my favorite Carl Sagan thoughts again:

“The Cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff.”

There it was again. Consciousness trying to understand consciousness.

Universe Within grew out of a stressful chapter of my life, but I don't think the painting itself is about illness. I think it's about wonder, adaptation and learning to sit with complex unknowns.

I'll be submitting Universe Within to Ryan Observatory this week.

Before it goes anywhere else, though, I wanted the people who have supported my work to see it first.