Watercolor and Ink
16 x 20 inches
2021-2026
This piece was created using the decalcomania method.
See Decalcomania.
This inspiration for this piece comes from our sudden universal awareness of microbes during the Covid epidemic of 2020 – 2021.
The process I use to generate these paintings loaned itself well to painting amoebas. In order to move and feed, these single-celled organisms change their shape, forming and stretching their pseudopods (blobby lobe-like structures). Though entirely fictional, I decided to title this painting with the scientific name of the amoeba, Chaos chaos.
Chaos chaos is a common species of giant amoeba that lives in the organic debris found on the bottoms of ponds and other slow-moving bodies of water. Similar species of Chaos live all over the world. They feed on organic debris, bacteria, algae, and other living protozoa. An unusual trait of this species is its enormous size. Reaching up to 5mm, it is one of the largest cells on Earth, and it is easily observed with the naked eye. Being this large, Chaos contains multiple nuclei, containing dozens to over 100,000 nuclei in a single cell. The function of all of this extra DNA seems to be due to the sheer size of this huge cell, allowing for gene expression and damage mitigation in various locations at once.