Since 2003 I have developed the Island series as a way of visually exploring states of perception, contradiction and ambiguity. I started by combining aspects of landscape painting—space, light and time—with elements of figuration—psychology, emotion and narrative. To heighten ambiguity, I imposed some rules: every painting in this series would be square (so there would be no favored orientation); there would be nothing to indicate scale (such as a tree); and the images would be of fractal subjects such as rock, water and sky. Within these constraints, the Islands expanded in complexity to include human, animal, vegetable, technological, geological, celestial, atmospheric, iconic, and symbolic polymorphic forms. I undermine pictorial conventions such as linear perspective, atmospheric perspective and light sources in order to unmoor the expected physics of a painting. These destabilized cues are enmeshed within many languages of painting from hard-edged to gestural, establishing zones of internal logic and dissonance.