Hello everyone and thank you for taking the time to find and explore this site!

What I am attempting to do through this Web Site is provide a body of work and knowledge that explores a new style of painting that I have coined "Zedism". In doing so, I hope to inspire, promote, and begin to define a new "school of thought" in today's critical art world. This is not for personal ego gratification or the "artist as hero" syndrome, but a purer desire to reflect to the viewer a synthesis of nature, science, form, and aesthetics. Additionally, I would like to furnish a fusion of established artistic styles and a connection between nature, art and technology in the hopes to eliminate the gap between today's perceived "technological and artistic" chaos and the underlying beauty of creation. As you will soon discover, Zedism is a climax of a billion of years of nature's creation, a thousand years of artistic creation, and a hundred years of technological revolution. It is how nature itself speaks to us.

This specific area of the site is included to assist the viewer, critic or artist in the understanding of Zedism, its terms, its application and its relevance in America's abundant cultural, artistic and technological world.

Please feel free to view the Zedist gallery and other visual areas of the site prior to reading any further. Or, if you have already seen enough, then continue through the following descriptions and become a Zedist yourself!

One more note before you go: In the CONTACT section you can send me an email with your comments. In the CRITIQUE section you can answer a questionnaire on the style of Zedism. In the REQUESTS section you can get more information, such as availability of original works, upcoming events, artist's background, etc.

If you would like to start your journey with an explanation of an actual painting, go back to the Home Page and click on the facet located between the "Elder's Eyes."

Simply speaking, it is a painting style whereby a 3-dimensional surface morphology is mapped or built onto the canvas plane and then utilized to construct imagery. The incorporated imagery may correspond to the geometry created by the surface morphology itself, span across multiple projections independently, or be placed in front of or behind the geometry altogether. A key stylistic ingredient to a successful Zedist piece is the presentation of competition between imagery and geometry for the forefront of the viewer's perception.

The word Zedism is derived from the root word "zed" which is a British word for the alphabetical letter "Z." Mathematically, the letter Z represents the 3rd axis of the Cartesian coordinate system. In geometry, a point in space is described by 3 coordinates given in reference to an arbitrary origin set at zero. The letters X and Y describe the point's position in a flat plane, whereas the letter Z gives the point depth, or a 3rd dimension. Therefore, Z or "Zed"ism, is about depth or dimension, and it is through the manipulation of the 3rd dimension on the canvas which distinguishes the Zedist style of painting.

The way geometry can be "fit" together in a plane starts the process unfolding. Nature provides an infinite gamut of possibilities ranging from the very ordered to completely random networks called "tesselations". Ordered forms are quite well studied in the mathematics of tilings and patterns while tesselations are mathematically constructed and studied using chaos theory. In addition, crystallography, a discipline which studies the structure of matter on a microscopic level, incorporates the laws of thermodynamics and molecular bond theory to explain how matter seeks to lower its "free energy" or entropy by naturally forming 3-dimensional "Zedist" or crystalline structures. These structures are very simply the "preferences" of nature, or its way of providing symmetry, order and balance. Scientists have spent a great deal of energy trying to predict and describe the dominant patterns in which matter will form for a given material. This in turn allows accurate predictions of macroscopic properties such as strength, electrical conductivity, thermal characteristics, etc. This knowledge is the building blocks of complex working systems such as a computer, an automobile or a building, hence, the industrial and technological revolution. What Zedism does is simply show the "lay person" what some of these fundamental structures might look like when blown up to canvas size. The fundamental balance of nature defines the balance of a Zedist piece.

What Zedism does is utilize lighting, geometry, and perspective to produce an illusion of form or structure projecting from (or sticking out of) the canvas. This "Zedist" morphology becomes the underlying theme of the painting. Concurrently, and without destroying this morphology, central imagery (which has its own unique lighting, color, perspective or shape) is embedded within or overlaid on the existing Zedist structure. As humans, we are binocular creatures (having two eyes) and therefore we perceive depth mechanically. However, as the mind is "tricked" into perceiving the Zedist structure as an actual physical body, the incorporated imagery must be juggled in and out of the imaginary Z-space (depth) created by the structure and this is where the contradiction lies. A successful Zedist piece will present the mind with one or more physical impossibilities that it must then coordinate into something manageable. To do so, it has to float between the physical manifestation of the geometry or the image. It is this "back and forth" process which is powerful and unique. Much in the way Surrealism defined the "paranoiac critical method" and experimented with the dual interpretation of objects and scenes, Zedism is a visual experiment in which the viewer is hit with the duality between the underlying natural geometric structure and the incorporated imagery.

The discovery of any fundamental natural principle should have as a cornerstone of proof its ability to be fit into or expound upon other areas of science, art or culture. Let me point out a few which Zedism accomplishes: Science Since Zedist morphologies are joined at the hip to complex mathematics, thermodynamics, and quantum physics which seek to explain the "hidden" ordered world, it is no wonder that they lend themselves so effortlessly to imagery in the macroscopic world. This is true because every object in the physical world can eventually be broken down into its fundamental molecular components, and once done, the most significant and permanent of them are "Zedist" in appearance. What we see around us every day is nothing more than the manifestations of long range order imposed at the molecular level. As infants, we become desensitized to the chaos of patterns around us in our instinct to make sense of the world. Most go through life seeing a tree as a "tree pattern" which fits with other "object" patterns stored in the brain for easy classification and recall. Zedism rejoins the common every day "tree" with its fundamental molecular/structural origins, and once done, allows the viewer to free associate the two entities again. Although completely geometric, the viewer is confronted with how "natural" or "organic" the Zedist morphologies "feel." It strikes a common chord or harmonic to the physical vibrations of nature itself. An artist is usually striving for balance, symmetry and order in perspective, lighting and color to give a work aesthetic beauty. Nature is doing the same thing with matter. The reason we connect with Zedism is simply because as humans, we are nature as well. Fine Arts Most obvious is cubism, or more broadly, abstract expressionism. What the cubists finally did was to deconstruct images and objects into their fundamental geometric components and show multiple sides or perspectives simultaneously. Other expressionist deconstructed images into color patterns. Though Zedism and these schools both rely on deconstruction to capture the viewer and render the images, they differ significantly in the perspectives utilized. Whereas cubism broke down the image into its existing component geometry, Zedism fits or overlays the image into a separate, yet natural geometric morphology. Whereas the expressionists broke down the image into its existing color components, Zedism gives order to the location of the color components which fit natures schema and ordering. Metaphorically, Zedism occupies the "Z" or 3rd axis of artistic creation. The "X" axis corresponds to classicism (linear) or realism, the "Y" axis corresponds to expressionism (planer) or emotional, and the "Z" corresponds to Zedism (3 dimensional) or virtual. It has joined classicism (symmetry, perspective) and expressionism (color and object) and given them a new dimension or axis. This new "Z" axis is called Zedism. As predicted, Zedism also corresponds to our digital, or "virtual" 3 dimensional world of the computer. This new world is a result of the technological revolution, but as pointed out, goes back to the core of nature itself. Music The patterns present in the structure of song are also represented in a Zedist painting. Each Zedist projection, having multiple sides, can be thought of as a musical chord. Each side to the chord is a note. The lighting scheme determines which notes are base notes (dark) and which are top notes (light). A run of chords in the same color scheme would all be in a certain "key". The overall painting, composed in multiple keys, would be the song. The song could be in harmony, discord, or challenge the viewer to find the "groove" intended by the artist.

This treatise is simply meant to get the dialog started in the definition of Zedism. I am by no means a scholar in the history of art and any misrepresentation of such is purely a by-product of taking the topic seriously. What you are seeing and reading about is the result of 28 years of preparations on my part. It is my sincere hope that I will find out there in the world like minds to share a vision of the world today. One in which all of its complexity, order, and beauty can be appreciated by an educated and flexible mind. If so, my suffering will have been worth every minute!!!