Introduction
When I was a kid, riding in the back seat of the family car, I’d look to the side of the road, close one eye, and align the bottom of the window with the dizzying rush of horizontals speeding past – fences, guard rails and walls. The window frame was a constant, the outside lines were an oscillating, ever-changing stream. For me, this was close enough to the infinity of LINE described in my geometry schoolbooks. And once introduced to the iconic lines, shapes and solids in those books, I couldn’t STOP seeing them everywhere; they were mental templates ready to be superimposed on any scene. The more mundane the shapes and objects, the more wonderfully they were transformed by the orderly mind’s-eye overlay of those ideals. A baseball was the perfect sphere, a building block the flawless cube.
The destination of that family car ride was often an Atlantic coast beach. On cloudy or foggy days, the view out that side window might offer a bonus: the horizon had vanished as the panorama of water and sky was reduced to a uniform tone. I knew the horizon was still there, but it now existed only in the mind’s eye. I learned that I could discover countless such instances when the boundaries between solid and space had melted away and I was left to picture them for myself. Here too, a mind’s eye template was superimposed on what was actually seen.
The SOLID AND SPACE pictures are my rediscovery of these childhood wonders, the simple delight and deeper mystery when opposing truths coexist, when vision and memory are in fragile agreement or odd competition.
