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“The Hermetic Book” series is inspired by the artifacts left by Western hermetic philosophers, most working from 1200 to 1700, most in northern Europe, and by some of the key principles of their practice. Primary among these inspirations is Michael Maier and one of his works, “Atalanta Fugiens”  - a collection of epigrams and woodcuts first published in 1617, that typifies the hermetic art.

More elementally, however, the series is an exploration of the power of symbolic and iconic meaning in paintings - of the potential for ramified, meaningful experience in the interaction between painting and viewer.

Paintings can and do have meaning - and not simply the common, “literary” meaning produced by a standard reading of photo-like images.

In the Book series, that meaning is not what first seems to be the case. There is more available - from the ontological foundation to things art-historical, aesthetic and philosophic. But, it is concealed, sealed away, hermetic, revealing itself only in the process of concentrated study.