Photo Collage, Acrylic and Resin on Wood Panel | 12×12 inches | 2" Deep | Custom Framed in Black Bold Face Wood Floater Frame | 2023 | Nudibranch Series
Press your face to the glass. Look closer.
Nudi Noir Glass is an aquarium you can hang on your wall.
The deep black background — total, absolute, the darkness of the ocean floor at two thousand metres — becomes through the alchemy of high-gloss resin something extraordinary. The resin surface does what water does, what glass does, what the curved wall of an aquarium does — it creates depth where there is none, it magnifies and clarifies and gives the creatures floating within it the particular quality of things seen through a medium denser than air. You are not looking at this painting. You are looking into it. And what you find there will make you question everything you thought you knew about what the natural world is capable of.
Because here they are. The nudibranch.
Nudibranch. Even the name is extraordinary — from the Latin nudus meaning bare, and the Greek brankhia meaning gills. Naked gills. A sea slug with naked gills. The most unglamorous possible description of the most glamorous possible creature. It is the artist's favourite fact about them — that something this spectacular, this neon, this impossibly beautiful answers to a name that sounds like a character in a children's book. Nudibranch. It is cute and cool and completely at odds with the creature it describes, which is part of what makes it perfect.
The artist discovered nudibranchs the way most people discover nudibranchs — through a photograph that stopped everything. Wait. This is real? This actually exists? In the ocean? Right now? And then the second discovery, almost more extraordinary than the first — that some of them are neon. Not bright. Not vivid. Neon. Bioluminescent. Glowing from within with a light that has no external source, that belongs entirely to the creature itself, that turns the deep ocean into something that looks less like nature and more like a dream someone is having about nature.
Nudi Noir Glass gathers seven of these impossible creatures against the deepest possible black and seals them under resin — and the result is exactly what it appears to be. An aquarium. A light box. A window cut into the wall through which the deep ocean is permanently, luminously visible. The teal and black spotted nudibranch at the centre glows with the particular intensity of something bioluminescent — teal against black, the colours of a screen in a dark room, of a neon sign reflected in wet pavement, of the deep ocean talking to itself in light. Around it, six companions glow in their own registers — pink flame, blue angel, orange spark, gold ember, black and white graphic, blue and orange electric — each one a separate miracle, each one contributing its particular frequency to a composition that hums and vibrates like something alive.
Because it is. Or was. And through the resin — through that glass-like surface that the black frame draws a perfect boundary around, making the whole panel feel like a specimen case in the world's most beautiful natural history museum — it always will be.
Part of the Nudibranch series — born from the discovery that not only do these creatures exist, and not only are some of them neon, but their name is nudibranch — and that combination of the sublime and the adorable is, it turns out, completely irresistible.
✦ Original, one-of-a-kind work ✦ Photo collage, acrylic and resin on wood panel ✦ 12 × 12 inches | 2" deep ✦ Custom framed in black bold face wood floater frame ✦ 2023 ✦ Part of the Nudibranch series ✦ Ready to hang ✦ Free worldwide shipping ✦ $1,500
Press your face to the glass. They were always here.
Photo Collage, Acrylic and Resin on Wood Panel | 12×12 inches | 2" Deep | Custom Framed in Black Bold Face Wood Floater Frame | 2023 | Nudibranch Series
Press your face to the glass. Look closer.
Nudi Noir Glass is an aquarium you can hang on your wall.
The deep black background — total, absolute, the darkness of the ocean floor at two thousand metres — becomes through the alchemy of high-gloss resin something extraordinary. The resin surface does what water does, what glass does, what the curved wall of an aquarium does — it creates depth where there is none, it magnifies and clarifies and gives the creatures floating within it the particular quality of things seen through a medium denser than air. You are not looking at this painting. You are looking into it. And what you find there will make you question everything you thought you knew about what the natural world is capable of.
Because here they are. The nudibranch.
Nudibranch. Even the name is extraordinary — from the Latin nudus meaning bare, and the Greek brankhia meaning gills. Naked gills. A sea slug with naked gills. The most unglamorous possible description of the most glamorous possible creature. It is the artist's favourite fact about them — that something this spectacular, this neon, this impossibly beautiful answers to a name that sounds like a character in a children's book. Nudibranch. It is cute and cool and completely at odds with the creature it describes, which is part of what makes it perfect.
The artist discovered nudibranchs the way most people discover nudibranchs — through a photograph that stopped everything. Wait. This is real? This actually exists? In the ocean? Right now? And then the second discovery, almost more extraordinary than the first — that some of them are neon. Not bright. Not vivid. Neon. Bioluminescent. Glowing from within with a light that has no external source, that belongs entirely to the creature itself, that turns the deep ocean into something that looks less like nature and more like a dream someone is having about nature.
Nudi Noir Glass gathers seven of these impossible creatures against the deepest possible black and seals them under resin — and the result is exactly what it appears to be. An aquarium. A light box. A window cut into the wall through which the deep ocean is permanently, luminously visible. The teal and black spotted nudibranch at the centre glows with the particular intensity of something bioluminescent — teal against black, the colours of a screen in a dark room, of a neon sign reflected in wet pavement, of the deep ocean talking to itself in light. Around it, six companions glow in their own registers — pink flame, blue angel, orange spark, gold ember, black and white graphic, blue and orange electric — each one a separate miracle, each one contributing its particular frequency to a composition that hums and vibrates like something alive.
Because it is. Or was. And through the resin — through that glass-like surface that the black frame draws a perfect boundary around, making the whole panel feel like a specimen case in the world's most beautiful natural history museum — it always will be.
Part of the Nudibranch series — born from the discovery that not only do these creatures exist, and not only are some of them neon, but their name is nudibranch — and that combination of the sublime and the adorable is, it turns out, completely irresistible.
✦ Original, one-of-a-kind work ✦ Photo collage, acrylic and resin on wood panel ✦ 12 × 12 inches | 2" deep ✦ Custom framed in black bold face wood floater frame ✦ 2023 ✦ Part of the Nudibranch series ✦ Ready to hang ✦ Free worldwide shipping ✦ $1,500
Press your face to the glass. They were always here.
