Sometimes I get asked, usually after people find out about my massive creative portfolio, how I manage to produce so much content. How I have so many ideas… They think I have a secret.

I guess I kind of do. Recursion.

I mastered the art of recursion.

So, I took up music and painting in 2016 at the age of 33. I’d dabbled with visual art and making music in my teen years, but not a day since becoming an adult. This was wildly new territory for me.

As I got my bearings artistically, I began to use music-making and painting as a form of actual art-therapy. All that trauma I accumulated while stumbling my way into adulthood armed me with a rather large cache of vivid imagery, snippets of conversation and thoughts that in hindsight could have saved me a lot of grief.

And I had this thing in my head. This sort of “trauma loop” behavior. Most people with trauma suffer from this. It’s this thing where a scent, a sound, a movie, a song can trigger a memory of something awful unbidden, and you then start to act out of character because your psyche goes into “oh shit it’s happening again” mode - it isn’t - and I wrestled with this for many many years.

It held me back socially. Emotionally. Many ways.

Until I started making art that allowed me to have fun while scanning over these traumas to play things differently, to express repressed hurt, anger, to imagine a better path for me if I could just push this particular piece of pain to the side…

I learned to recurse in these trauma loops, because that’s what trauma loops do. They’re these insidious behavior patterns that listen for triggers, then play out a chemical and emotional scenario in your mind and body, then those sensations get fed back into your system and a panic begins to arise because the body/mind connection is a force and its like - hell no, not doin that again!

That’s a bit personal, and I hope it didn’t make you uncomfortable to hear, but it’s an interesting part of this story. It’s an origin point that is honest and instructive. Creativity can come spring up from many, many, different sources. And you can use it to transform almost anything into a work of art.

That’s what I do. I find an interesting, agitating, stuck-thinking type of inspiration, and then I say, “what happens when instead of X I react with Y type response” - I’m feeding a familiar scenario into my creative capacity with a new variable. A recursion upon the original experience.

In the 10 years I’ve been doing this type of thing day in and day out, certain patterns have emerged and held true over time.

Recursion being among the most present in my creative output.

Here, let me bring it on home for you. Story time? Story time.

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Scatter-Grids are for Horses

Here’s what I mean… I painted a horse once.

Now, I’d never painted a horse before this painting. But I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to capture. There’s this family legend about my great-great-grandparents involving a Native American princess. My grandmother on my mom’s side had recently passed and I wanted to do a fantasy painting worthy of gifting to my mom in my grandmother’s memory. So, I envisioned this Native American princess running about on horseback with her young child. And I really really didn’t want to muck it up.

I’m a systems thinker, so, I developed a very specific and deliberate process for making sure I created something that was more than fridge-worthy-til-next-friday.

Using a song lyric as foundation, I created a scatter grid on a medium sized 16x20 1-inch canvas. The placement of the letters on the canvas were completely random and when I was done I had a canvas covered in penciled letters that looked like they’d been inscribed by someone in the middle of some kind of neurological or mental health event. That meant we were off to a great start.

These are landmarks for the under-drawing - roughed-in, gestural pencil lines that give me the basic big shapes. Using those shapes I can place the details of the finer pieces of the painting to create the final drawing before I start painting.

I use the drawing’s completed under-drawing to lay in blocks of approximate color to my vision and reference image. The Horse’s silhouette is easy to lock-in because I overlaid a head-on picture of my scatter grid on top of my reference image, see? Almost perfect proportions every time.

Then I can paint thinly to start building layers continuing to use the combination of the underdrawing and scatter grid to lay in my colors correctly. Eventually, the painting’s vision begins to emerge through continued iteration.

It didn’t matter that I’d never drawn a horse before. I didn’t need to even DRAW a horse. Recursion allowed me instead to focus on drawing the major shapes in relation to their pencil-letter landmarks on the canvas. Recursion allowed me to block in color using those lines from the under drawing, and the layering was done by utilizing all the work that came before all the way down to constellations of landmarks made my by lyrics. The horse emerged from the recursion.

This isn’t JUST a painting technique. It’s my whole creative philosophy in one canvas.

The song lyric scatter-grid fed the Gestural.

The gestural was the foundation for the under drawing.

The blocking-in of color is grounded in the under-drawing…

And the layering and finalization of the colors and details utilizes all of the former to arrive to a really neat painting that sort of deconstructs itself the closer you get to it.

You can still see when you get about 2-3 feet away that scatter grid underneath. A spatial cipher of my song from my game’s universe.

It’s all one thing, see? I’m not creating a painting of a horse any more than I’m building a discrete, lore-dense gaming universe. Those are byproducts of just doing what I do when I activate my creative mode.

I sometimes describe my creative process as Ouroborean - you know the old legend of the snake eating its own tail? I loop my artistic outputs back into my creative engine brain thing and it does fun “what happens when…” type thought experiments and out comes new creative output. Sometimes completely unrelated, like how the fantasy painting of my grandmother on the horse was born from lyrics to my song Mister Spaceman.

I recurse. That’s recursion. Right there.

That painting? That is what recursive creative thinking actually looks like. The scatter grid. The letters becoming proportions. The horse I’d never drawn. The illusion of detail that only works because of all those layers underneath.

The song I’d written and dedicated to my mom in my first book became a painting because I recursed.

The process of painting like that taught me how to think recursively.

That recursive thinking is how I came to create Tau-Tongue.

And now Tau-Tongue is generating worlds all on its own. What I created within, I’ve now created without.

That’s pretty dang cool for a guy that still can’t draw a horse.