In one of my favorite sci-fi books, the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, the author introduces the concept of Viriditas, as a philosophy of people who see it as their duty to spread life to other planets. Viriditas, the green energy, is described as the will of life itself to move out and spread out and seek new patterns and forms. And the humans that appear in the story take this as a guiding principle in their pursuit of terraforming  the solar system.

Its an idea that has stuck with me a long time. The green energy of life pushing out into the universe like the vine of a plant clawing and crawling up the side of a building, pushing forward its slow but persistent bid to take over everywhere.

This constant spreading, rising, reverberating and growing is at the core of my drawings. When I create these works I don’t always care to know what forms and directions a drawing will take. I just want to see it drop into a space and thrive across it like a metaphor for Viriditas.

There are other concepts like this that exist across science, sort-of-science and outright science fiction. The Extended Phenotype, The Gaia Hypothesis and The Green of DC comics. Each of these has great appeal to me both from a life philosophy viewpoint in addition to my art-making. What is it about them that so inspires me? I wonder on that a lot.

Perhaps it is nothing more than a hopeful belief about the world having a direction in and of itself. Of the universe having directed energy that moves out among the world with something more than consciousness, , creating, growing and evolving.

They are all reminiscent of the energy I find when drawing. No mind, but the growing mind. No eyes but the drawing eyes.