Many thanks to Gene McHugh for a thorough and thoughtful essay on my artwork in his Post Internet blog. Many threads are pulled together over the course of a few decades that might not seem to be part of any overall pattern. It's only half-clear to me since I'm still in the middle of it.
I like the way the essay keeps coming back to the theme of getting down into the structure of things. McHugh's description of photorealism is terrific--better than I've articulated about what's going on in the paintings I did in that style--the idea that painting reveals something about photography by isolating its conventions in another medium. And he traces that same kind of thought process through several phases of working that don't seem connected at all: the sub-canvas (paper) investigation in the abstract paintings; the cybermedia-about-printmedia in the MSPaintbrush portraits; right up to GIFs and other ostensibly outmoded programs and filetypes. The connections to cyberpunk lit are also much appreciated; I'm constantly thinking about what the movement got right and what it got wrong.