Learning to Count to One (again)

(Quarantine 2020, for Joel)

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Learning to count to one. These little 8" x 8" watercolors are meditations on learning to count to one; using what the eye can see and the mind can perceive as one, sometimes playfully, about what constitutes a set, composition, a singularity in some sense, a core, with all of its equivocations, denials, affirmations, approximations, entanglements, phantom echos and reverberations.  

 

This seemingly simple issue is, for me, as much about ontology and consciousness as it is counting, per se.   What is "one" as opposed to "many"?  When do many compose a large enough set to be seen as one?   When is a seemingly random field of waves and particles one--perhaps in a way we do not readily perceive?  What is social disintegration, moral integration?  When are many the necessary constituent parts of one?  How, when and where are we aware (of the one)?  

Since Albers, colorists known that color's perceptual identity is not absolute, but rather is contingent on adjacency and background.

Finally, in what sense are we one as "individuals" enmeshed in a social and biological network?  

Just musing...