New letterform paintings

Eeyore, 40" by 30", Acrylic on canvas, 2011

Tiggers, 30" by 30", Acrylic on canvas, 2011

Two new paintings. Letter/counter forms. I took passages of text from The Te of Piglet by Benjamin Hoff because I've been thinking about Taoism a little bit lately. Religion and spirituality haven't been big themes in my art but I have a renewed interest in the universe (or Cosmos :). I find the vastness of space and infinate variety of planet and galaxy make-ups intriguing. This relates to my sense of spirituality in that we are all connected in this universe: we have the same atoms that the stars do, we are made of the same stuff.
More specifically, these paintings are an exploration of the space inbetween the letters and lines of text of our printed word. Letters are beautiful because they are forms unto themselves . . . but it's the tension of the space around the letters that these paintings explore. Do the spaces between letters correspond to the vast distances between galaxies? Letters represent words that represent thoughts. What if the words aren't "readable" in a literary sense . . . but more evoked by the counterforms? Or the sense of the flow of text establishes a new way to read the forms? Our brains will no doubt force us to make sense of the portions of words that are visible . . . what will it make of the negative space? The negative space becomes the positive. Figure/ground reversal.
So perhaps these paintings aren't cosmic in their meaning (that might be asking too much of myself lol) but the interelationship of positive and negative shapes reflect our universe's laws of duality.
I'd like to take these paintings beyond the canvas and make sculptural forms aswell! Bring on the jigsaw!