In 2020, I found a mark.

It looked like a cell. Something inside it wanted to divide, branch, and multiply. It resembled things I had seen before: lichen, roots, antennae, coral, microscopic life. Yet it was none of these exactly.

I began following it.

Six years later, I completed The Scroll, a continuous painting 150 feet long. What began as a single mark had bloomed into an elaborate, interconnected world. I am starting to understand its language.

I paint entirely from memory. The textures of scales, mycelium, and minerals mingle with recollections of other places and forms of life. Nothing is copied directly from nature, yet almost everything seems to have originated there. The forms move between the biological and the geological, the microscopic and the monumental. I can’t always tell whether I’m looking at an organism, a fossil, a branching river, or a system of nerves.

I continue to follow the mark.