The Alchemical Studio: Materia Prima

Materia Prima, enhanced monotype, oil on paper, 20 by 30 cm, 2025.

Notes from the Alchemical Studio: On Spiral Bellies and Iris Thresholds

In the weeks before surgery -I had a parathyroidectomy, where they found some thyroid cancer metastases from the cancer I was treated for 20 years ago- I revisited three monotypes from way back that felt less like artworks and more like dreamscapes pressed into paper. One of them I left unfinished—a viridio piece. It felt like something that wasn’t done speaking.
I drew forward a lizard, belly curled around a spiral, with the sun blazing on its back. Above it, a figure tucked into the folds of a dark iris, like a cocoon. The whole composition felt like a threshold: a body caught in metamorphosis—suspended, mid-spell.
Returning to it these last few days, the layers deepened. The lizard’s spiral belly became a kind of core memory—or maybe a biological imperative—the way healing doesn’t follow straight lines. The iris petals opened more fully, embracing the figure not as a tomb but as a chrysalis. The sun—once a symbol of exposure—now feels like a crown.
There’s something about working on paper like this, where the texture speaks its own language. The scraping, smudging, and pressure become an alchemical record of becoming—as if the studio itself remembers the body that moved through it.
This piece, once too unresolved to name, now feels like it was never meant to be “finished” in the usual sense. It had to travel with me through time, pain, and healing—through some half-dreamed rite of passage. It reminds me that transformation isn’t always glorious. It’s often messy, cracked open, full of old weather and new seeds.
I titled it Spiral Weather.

There’s always curiosity that follows the making of a monotype — after the paper is lifted, the paint dries, and the gesture settles into paper. It’s there that something reveals itself, a figure, a sun, a spiral, a lizard. My reflections about these works come to the surface like these figures appear in my monotype: slowly, unpredictably, sometimes with wings.
The prints began as remnants — the residue of palette and pressure, accidental landscapes formed from what remained. And yet, something in them kept calling me back: I returned to them with paint and thought, with dream and memory and they began to speak a language both older and more intuitive than I expected. This space — between the raw material of image and the clarity of symbol — is where I started to take notes. Some are just murmurs, others declarations.
Alchemy, dream, grief, absurdity, the shadow of a lizard carrying the sun— they’ve all left footprints in this ongoing process. My writing, putting the cued reflections as words on paper, holds the echo of that journey, from the edge of the print.