A sample of works created by combining single images from the Caustic Optimism project into larger compositions. Just as a musician might compose music to interpret lyrics, I create large visual assemblages to interpret text passages.
An example is “This Sweet Interlude,” which can be read like a paragraph. Starting from the top left of the assembly (image 1) and reading across the rows to the end (image 20):
Row 1
1 We are dropped safely ashore
2 to contemplate the fundamental fact that our lives—
3 along with all of our yearnings and fears,
4 our most small-spirited grudges and most largehearted loves,
Row 2
5 our greatest achievements and deepest losses—
6 will pass like the lives and loves and losses
7 of everyone who has come before us
8 and everyone who will come after.
Row 3
9 Temporary constellations of matter
10 in an impartial universe of constant flux,
11 we will come and go
12 as living-dying testaments to Rachel Carson’s lyrical observation that
Row 4
13 “against this cosmic background
14 the lifespan of a particular plant or animal
15 appears, not as drama complete in itself,
16 but only as a brief interlude
Row 5
17 in a panorama of endless change.”
18 The measure of our lives—
19 the worthiness or worthlessness of them—
20 resides in the quality of being with which we inhabit the interlude.
—from Maria Popova, “The Fate of Fausto”
The Study • The Short Story • The Novella
