For my essay on my 2007-2009 painting series, Daily Markings on the Face of the Earth, please see my essay in Cultural Politics.

I just started a new body of work, Shape of a New Continent, which will be discussed in the upcoming book Virilio Now: Current Perspectives in Virilio Studies (edited by John Armitage and Joy Garnett). I use gravity, in this series, to pull the paint across the canvas. Exploring this new direction, I researched commentary on this elusive force of nature. Here is what I found:


That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.
—Isaac Newton

Love is metaphysical gravity.
—Richard Buckminster Fuller

Pick a flower on earth and you move the farthest star.
—Paul A.M. Dirac, Nobel Prize in Physics 1933

It is a mathematical fact that the casting of a pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.
—Thomas Carlyle, satirical writer during the Victorian era

The floating vapor is just as true an illustration of the law of gravity as the falling avalanche. –John Burroughs, American naturalist and essayist important in the evolution of the U.S. conservation movement

Gravity pulls our bodily fluids down, like water in a glass goes to the bottom part of a glass. In space, [water] distributes itself evenly over time throughout the entire volume of the glass.
—Laurel Clark, NASA astronaut and flight surgeon; killed in the space shuttle Columbia disaster

The call to adventure signifies the destiny that has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown.
—Joseph Campbell

The most impressive fact is that gravity is simple.
—Richard P. Feynman

Unfortunately, however, the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics are known to be inconsistent with each other—they cannot both be correct.
—Stephen W. Hawking

Gravity cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.
—Albert Einstein