As an artist, I traveled to many of the places you mentioned, in Turkey & Spain, and created a body of work based on this study, part of a ten year trilogy called, Ephemera & Culture: Italy, Turkey, Japan. East, West, and the gateway between. Nothing on this earth has come closer to the divine for me than these Islamic spaces.

Recently I experienced a guided journey, a la Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind. What I saw during this extraordinary trip was a made-visible crystalline architecture of such incomprehensible mathematical complexity and astounding beauty, and so beyond the capacity of my own imagination, that I am convinced it is real. In the room was one of my artworks, with an image in it of an islamic ceiling from the Alhambra, I think. It was in constant motion and in dialogue with the divine architecture surrounding it.

Thank you for this article. You have given me an important piece that I have missed in understanding my own work. The mirror has been an important physical and conceptual construct for my entire career. Of course these patterns are mirror images of themselves. Now I know better my attraction to them, and why I used the mirror surface as a ground for them. Now I have a deeper understanding how it led to my current work and how it connects to my earliest work as a young artist.