When this piece hung on the wall at the Z Finale show, a Burning Man inspired collection of interactive and flammable exhibits, a grey-haired professorial type looked the painting over carefully and solemnly and then turned to me authoritatively to announce that I had almost got it and should keep trying. I resisted the impulse to light the alcohol in the old fellow's cup and just smiled in mute acceptance of his incomprehensible critique. He may have been a mathematician, a cosmologist or a painter, but I suspect he was none of these special things but instead that most insidious of all art-opening creatures, the pontificating dilettante, quite common at Burning Man events and poetry slams. This work in acrylics on a rare self-stretched canvas was the last painting of my sojourn in Portland and to-date my only physical collaboration on a painting with another artist. Diagnosed with collapsed discs in my lumbar spine and a degenerative condition among my thoracic vertebrae, I was scheduled for surgery to correct creeping numbness and constant pain, so I hung this canvas on the wall in a sunny corridor low enough to paint while sitting on the floor. My process was revealing a path for me forward as a painter through the developing methodology latter described as Simplexity. This conceptual path lay through the fusion of the legacy of art with anomalous regions of topology, cosmology and post-Newtonian physics. After six weeks of toil, discovery and exaltation my good friend Bruce Thorn, Chicago painter of note, made an offer during a visit to, "finish the work for me." Heavily drugged with painkillers and admittedly looking for a way to finish a work that was conceptually infinite in nature, I acceded to Bruce's request with alacrity, handed him the white kitchen bowl I used for a palette and my small collection of brushes, and left the room for a quiet, relaxing smoke outdoors. When I returned to a somewhat chastened Bruce he had used a few broad strokes of cobalt blue to accentuate and define the abnormal structure of the hyper-ring, while at the same time defining a primitive totemic mass at it's center utilizing most of the high-key elements left. It was fucking brilliant, and I told him so.