Seizure

My friend and fellow painter Shannon Lewis and I worked on several collaborative paintings.  They're currently being displayed at Urban Grind located at 911 NW 14th Avenue, Portland, OR 97209. 

It started with epilepsy.  Epilepsy, for me, turned into exploration of absence seizures and the idea of being both physically present and psychologically absent.

The physicality of absence seizures lead to thoughts of the body's circuitry and in opposition to absence seizures, paralytic states of consciousness where the body is immobilized but can still experience floating out of body experiences.

During our trading of the paintings back and forth, I noticed Shannon had developed her own inspiration within and outside of epilepsy.  Rather than trying to control the crux of the individual works, we attempted to allow our own concepts, as well as our painting styles, to exist simultaneously.

It was something new for me to work collaboratively, sometimes trying, but overwhelmingly positive.  I think we both struggled initially with how we were going to marry my, literally darker, figurative work with her more colorful work in abstraction.  In the end the works stand on their own, I think, apart from Shannon and I.  I like to think of the paintings as imaginary worlds that are strangely alien but familiar and of the mind, exploding.