The “Bow of Odysseus” is a scheme which I devised in my twenties. I spent a long time drawing straight lines cornering around invisible distortions in space. When my cornerings ran out of space, I had to go inward. I knew that I was spiraling, but I wanted to conceal this. I discovered that I could continue unnoticed if my interior cornerings reacted to the exterior shell that preceded it. This meant that I would veer inexorably towards an inevitable center. The new image became a recursive web of crossings that involved upon itself without apparent pattern or motive.
The Bow of Odysseus is an incomplete set of rules for composing canvas-filling shapes. Parts of the execution are automatic, but I am required to make choices at every juncture. After the initial lines are drawn, I reinforce the apparent image and remove evidence of the choices that preceded it. This is a representation of my commitment to moving forward into the future, despite whatever mistakes I may have made in the past.
The mythological Odyssean bow was a legendary weapon that could launch an arrow of such velocity that it would pierce through the rings of ten axes before losing its elevation to gravity. Only one man had the strength to string such an instrument and he did so as proof of his identity and to reclaim his heritage.
The story of Odysseus is the story of a man’s continuity as he is forced to adapt to unforeseeable circumstances. The lament of Odysseus was that after he died, he realized that his life of “greatness” had actually robbed him of true enjoyment. He rued that he should have been an ordinary man, without schemes, who only sought to appreciate the beauty of nature.