There is a distracting urge, a cause to attention, that fungi and mushroom have over the curious. They always exist within meters of us, seen but unnoticed.
The frail and temporary caps of the mushroom, often only hours old, seem to remain present in my mind and in my art much longer. The life-force that grew the mushroom, the fungi, still lives dormant and transcendent of time until the next opportunity to grow more again.
Below is a drawing completed in high school, I want to show how certain ideas, images and symbols can remain in our mind for years, and surface when the creative interest arises.
Untitled Mushroom Illustration, 2010, Ink on paper.
In my art, the journey I made in an older work becomes a stepping stone for later works. This work signifies the deep need for structure in an intimidating environment, and reveals a symbol of ever-prescience, of perpetual existence.
It explores other forms of life we don't daily acknowledge; namely fungi and vegetation, each with a root system that nurtures from the earth, a process we often take for granted.
Vandyke brown Prints: In these two prints, and their proceeding digital photographs, I study the detailed and delicate structures of the mushroom caps. The temporal quality of the mushrooms are passively represented in the Vandyke brown prints, while their color counterparts reveal the vitality still in the frills.
Pair of prints featuring macro-photographs of mushrooms, next to original digital images. 2016.