Nudi Red Fungi

Photo Collage, Acrylic and Resin on Wood Panel | 12×12 inches | 2" Deep | Custom Framed in White Wood Floater Frame | 2023 | Nudibranch Series

There are no nudibranchs in this painting.

And yet it belongs completely, unquestionably, to the Nudibranch series — because what the series has always really been about is not the nudibranch specifically but the wider truth the nudibranch represents. The truth that the natural world is so extravagantly, so recklessly, so incomprehensibly beautiful that to look at it carefully is to feel something fundamental shift in your understanding of what is possible. The nudibranch was the door. The fungi kingdom is what lies beyond it.

Nudi Red Fungi is a love letter to red. Every shade, every texture, every expression of red that the fungal world has ever produced — assembled against the warm gold of the raw wood panel in a composition that glows like an ember, like a garnet held up to candlelight, like the inside of something very old and very alive.

The fly agaric presides — of course it does. That iconic red and white spotted cap, the most recognised mushroom in human history, stands at the right of the composition with the quiet authority of something that has been the subject of fairy tales and shamanic ceremonies and children's illustrations for centuries and knows it. Beside it, a magnificent large-capped pink and white mushroom spreads its generous form — softer, more domestic, the kind of mushroom that appears in illustrations of forest floors where small animals live in comfortable burrows. Above, a deep crimson flat-capped fungi spreads like a stain of pure colour against the gold background.

And then the extraordinary ones.

Bottom left — a nudibranch of the fungal world. A white and red spotted organism covered in perfect crimson drops arranged with a precision that mirrors exactly the spotted surface of the fly agaric above it — nature rhyming with itself across species, across kingdoms, the same pattern appearing in the same colours in two completely different organisms because the universe, it turns out, has favourite ideas and returns to them. Red coral fungi bubble in the lower centre in a texture so extraordinary, so precisely repeated, that it looks three dimensional even through the resin. Dark red coral crystal shoots upward through the centre. Fan-shaped bracket fungi spread across the upper right in deep burgundy waves.

The raw wood panel background — visible between the elements, warm and golden — is not empty space. It is the ground, the earth, the forest floor from which all of this grows. It gives the composition a warmth and naturalness that the black background pieces of this series don't have — less aquarium, more forest. Less deep ocean, more woodland in autumn, late afternoon, the light coming gold and horizontal through the trees.

Through the resin — through that glass-like surface that preserves and deepens and gives everything beneath it the quality of something glimpsed through clear water — all of it glows. The red. The gold. The white. The deep crimson. All of it permanently, completely, magnificently alive.

Presented in a clean white wood floater frame that allows the warm gold of the panel to breathe, Nudi Red Fungi arrives completely finished and ready to hang.

✦ Original, one-of-a-kind work ✦ Photo collage, acrylic and resin on wood panel ✦ 12 × 12 inches | 2" deep ✦ Custom framed in white wood floater frame ✦ 2023 ✦ Part of the Nudibranch series ✦ Ready to hang ✦ Free worldwide shipping ✦ $1,500

The door was the nudibranch. Beyond it — everything.