Bidirectionally Infinite This painting incorporates a visual interpretation of another "view" of infinity I had been thinking about at the time. There is a book called "Powers of Ten" whose author I don't recall at the moment. In it, there were photographs which fascinated me. Each successive photograph was taken 10 times farther away from the previous distance. Eventually, after several exponentially greater distances -- where inches eventually became miles, and where miles eventually became light years, the literal power of distance became beautifully apparent. After looking at all the pictures, beginning with giant hair follicles on the rugged surface of a man's hand (each of which looked like great, arching black cylinders coming from a criss-crossed landscape) and "ending" with a view back to our own Milky Way galaxy, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to paint a painting not only of the outward expanse toward infinity, but also inward toward the infinitely microscopic detail BELOW the surface of the man's skin layer. If one thinks about these two directions -- one outward, and one inward -- and if one tried to paint from the inward-most vantage point outward, one might see the image to the left. The universe of stars would be "out there," while the network of fine fibers (of skin and cell-nuclei) would appear "above" this beginning vantage point. Granted, it is a little odd to be thinking of showing both "images" of infinitely different directions all in the same painting, but the idea intrigued me enough to try to paint it. Back