08/28/2026
Electric Menagerie continues…
“The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in this world.
Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention. Perhaps the second is to be patient. And perhaps a third is to be attentive to what the body knows . . . . The moment is an invitation, and the bear’s invitation to participate is offered, without prejudice, to anyone passing by.”
— Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
Inspired by the growing body of expansive ecological writing, including Zoe Schlanger’s Light Eaters, Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive?, and Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, the paintings imagine the vibrant, intelligent, and interconnected lives of the more-than-human world. They reach toward a childlike sense of wonder, where the boundaries between imagination and ecology dissolve, and every living being radiates its own presence.
Painted with luminous neon acrylic paint on unfinished birch panels, the animals seem charged from within, revealing an unseen current that pulses through all life. Their direct gaze invites encounter rather than observation, asking the viewer to meet them as fellow beings rather than symbols. Each creature is bathed in the light of a recurring orb—a quiet witness, a celestial presence, or a source of shared vitality.
The paintings arise from a contemplative Buddhist practice that understands all beings as interconnected expressions of a shared living field. Electric Menagerie is an invitation to reconsider our relationship with the living world, not as something separate from ourselves, but as an animate community of intelligence, mystery, and kinship.
