Domino

My friend and colleague Jake Olson was having trouble in finding the relevance of art and had found only pure abstract expressionism to possibly be able capture the human condition. Jake's inquisitive nature rubbed off on me and while painting the butterflies of "Domino", I could not find the relevance of my efforts to the greater picture. "Domino" was a study on chaos theory or "the butterfly effect" which I believe to be relevant to everybody, as it takes everybody to turn a butterflies wings into hurricanes. I find chaos theory particularly relevant to my life as for somewhat chaotic reasons I am being kicked out of Stout and catapulted across the globe to the monasteries of Japan to study Zen Painting. This project was particularly fun, as to capture the chaos I was attempting expressionistic splatter art and spray effect in my prior sketchs vegetation to help in capturing the chaotic nature of the earth. After many trials I found that I could capture chaos with just the Butterflies. I found this solution to really contain a lot of movement and capture the essence of each butterfly effecting the wind space of the neighboring insect. After finishing the painting I burned the image onto my silk screen and printed several copies. I found this to be a very good discovery as I will be turning my future Zen Paintings into Tea-Shirts. I then took ink and dragged stripes across the piece creating the American flag. The end resulted in bringing eastern art around the globe through the very americanized proccess of screen printing. Looking at the finished pieces was having relevance slap me in the face. The lesson I took was that you can live life like nothing (is relevant) matters or like everything (is relevant) matters.