Narrative

My work, as a painter, often focuses on everyday objects grouped in a way that seems to tell a story about the people who brought them all together. The way I set up my still life objects is just as important as how I paint them. When I talked to Thomas about his work, we realized we could implement the analysis techniques he uses to identify signatures in network brain activity on a series of still life paintings. In essence, we would be using the programs to identify “artistic signatures” in my paintings, perhaps visual and compositional similarities that I tend to repeat. 

​

We analyzed four paintings total: three older paintings (figures 1-3) and one new one made specially for this project (above). The painting Loud, Red Trucks was inspired by another facet of Thomas’ work. Passionate about autism research, Thomas conducted his thesis work on identifying signature differences in striatal resting states in brains of those with and without autism. One of the characteristics of autism is repetitive interest or fixation on certain subject matter or special objects, such as trains, cameras, stuffed animals, batteries, etc. Because his research focus was largely analyzing brains of those with autism, I decided to organize this still life around some of the special objects that fascinate children, especially those with autism. Models of emergency vehicles are arranged neatly over an array of flags of the world, and planes dart in and out through the composition as a Lego man in his own homemade airplane teeter over a stack of books. Cards, batteries, shoelaces and various cords loop throughout, and the pile is topped with a bouquet-like display of thermometers – which are objects of fixation for all of us during this pandemic.