Introduction

“Behind it, of course, was a certain impatience with the numerology of society and the way we're being made into cyphers…”- Patrick McGoohan

“I paint with shapes.” - Alexander Calder

The Cypher Series

(the) SI-fer SER-Es

Pareidolia is a type of apophenia – seeing patterns in random data. One of the clearest examples of the phenomena is our instinctive need from infancy to look for human faces in the imagery around us. We leave the womb looking for a mother’s face and go on looking for that human recognition for the rest of our lives. I believe our modern world is transforming us all into random, depersonalized data that we need to reassemble into some semblance of humanity. These small works reassemble silent, stoic, black and white symbols into our faces.

Many of the personalities forged in the Cypher Series are based on living, breathing people. Just as Calder was a mechanical engineer by training and turned to structural support wire to “sketch” his peers in 3D, I wanted to take my other world of writing – its words, type and fonts – and transform them into the faces of my friends and models to produce The Cypher Series. On occasion, the images can take on lives of their own, leaving another canvas to take on the originally intended image.

I share the concerns of many that technology and the abandonment of the written word make us more “stats and figures” than human beings. I hope these works remind folks who see them that we need to look into each other’s faces to know who we are. The Cypher Series works are available for sale individually or grouped. Images can be commissioned on canvas or as murals.