Paintings and studies, 2023–2025
Between 2023 and late 2025, I undertook a sustained inquiry — through studies, paintings, and deepening academic work in depth psychology — into what I came to call the Primal Aesthesis series. The name itself points toward something pre-rational: aesthesis as raw sensory encounter, the body’s original knowing before language intervenes.
The organizing question was deceptively simple: what happens to the psyche when it loses its felt and actual connection to the natural world?
“It is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal”
— C.G. Jung
I kept returning to Jung’s idea as a diagnostic invitation. The wound he gestured toward is something we all carry collectively. It’s the severance from the animate world that our ancestors inhabited so deeply and richly. As we treat nature with indifference, we drift from our essential selves: the primal being who knew, through every sense, that it belonged both to nature and to the wilderness of our imagination.
Ecopsychology names this drift. It maps the psychological cost of our estrangement from the more-than-human world, and proposes that healing the inner life and healing our relationship to the earth are not separate projects. This series lives inside that proposition.
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and one of the most searching voices at the intersection of indigenous knowledge and ecological science. She writes of wishing she could photosynthesize — to do the work of the world simply by being present in it, shimmering at the meadow’s edge. That image has stayed with me. What moves me is not its whimsy but its longing. It names a reciprocity we have largely forgotten — the sense that presence itself is participation.
That longing has a name, too. Erich Fromm called it biophilia: the passionate love of life and of all that is alive. Edward O. Wilson later proposed that the tendency to seek connection with nature and other life-forms is not merely cultural but partly genetic, written into us at a depth we rarely acknowledge. We are, in some structural sense, creatures made for contact with the living world.
These paintings are an attempt to restore that contact sensorially. Each work begins in direct encounter: light behaving strangely on water, the particular weight of coastal air, the way a hillside holds color differently at the edge of fog. The primal senses are the entry point. Mythological resonance, the deeper patterning beneath the surface image, follows from that grounded encounter, not the other way around.
The series tries to enact the rewilding of the psyche, image by image, in the psyche of anyone who pauses long enough to feel what the work is reaching toward.
