Look Closer #3: Strange Currencies

Sep 11

2 min read

"Look Closer" #3 — Strange Currencies

Last week I was scrolling through my photo archives hoping to find some content gems related to the creation of my latest silk. To my delight I discovered I had, once again, filmed the exact session that birthed Strange Currencies, the 3rd edition in the Look Closer series. Rewatching the timelapse of the paint curling into small spinning eddies, I felt a familiar surge of excitement that I often feel when observing patterns in nature, a sense of understanding some universal truth about the essence of the cosmos.

I’ve long known that my awe of patterns in nature is the inspiration for all my art, but I’m not always sure the link is apparent to others. Earlier this year I bought a handful of books on the subject in the hopes that if I understood the mechanics I might be able to make the link more evident. I quickly learned I am more interested in the abstract beauty of the patterns than the complex equations that explain it.

My excitement was reawakened after listening to a podcast interview with Steven Strogatz who talked about his affinity with artists using the phrase “Mathematical Impressionism” to explain his approach to understanding patterns in nature. He said, “instead of making a photo realistic painting of the world or the mathematical equivalent, I like to get inspired by something in nature or in the world, and then do something that's much simpler.“ Hearing those words I felt a sense of relief- marbling is the much simpler approach. Understanding the mechanics of natural phenomena may not be necessary to communicate my reverence for it.

Strange Currencies takes its name from the swirling eddies that formed as my stylus moved through water — small, spinning currents of paint that emerged on their own. I love that marbling is a medium that makes this invisible process visible. An eddy in real water disappears the instant it forms. The paint in my tray doesn't let it disappear — it holds the record of the movement long after the movement is over.

When I marble, I'm not painting a spiral. I'm not painting anything, really. I'm disturbing a fluid allowing the paint to reveal how the fluid moves under disturbance — and how it moves is exactly how water, air, and galaxies do when they're set in motion: they spiral, they eddy, they fold into currents. The paint isn't standing in for the physics as a symbol. It's undergoing the same physics, just at a scale and speed I can see and hold in my hands. When you look at Strange Currencies, you're not looking at a picture of a current. You're looking at an actual current, captured on paper and translated to silk. Pre-Order now.