From Where We Live We See the Backs of Stars

This piece is one within a series of acrylic paintings in petri dishes. It was inspired by this Walt Whitman poem: "When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them... How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, ... In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars." And this quote/description about Walt Whitman himself by poet Jane Hirshfield: "Whitman chose to live as a person of the threshold, who could throw off the limits of what he was permitted to say, the limits of what he was permitted to be and speak finally for and AS a cosmos.”