While standing for hours in my studio, working on a monumental canvas with heavy, resistant matter, I made a discovery that reaches far beyond painting. I notice that ‘the core’ I was searching for is not some vague mental concept. The core of what I experience within myself is exactly the same as the core of a tearing earth’s crust, an Icelandic geyser, or a cosmic vacuum.

Through painting so intensively, I notice that the boundary between myself and matter falls away completely. I am not simply making a picture; for me, painting has become the ultimate physical gateway to understanding the quantum field.

How I Force Pure Potential into Reality

In quantum physics I read about the theories of Paul Dirac, in which the absolute vacuum, the so-called ‘nothing’, is in reality an infinite, churning ocean of pure potential: the Dirac sea. Particles first exist there as waves of probability; they are everything and nothing at the same time. Only when interaction takes place does that wave collapse and pure potential transform into a tangible particle. This is exactly what I experience when I stand before a large, empty canvas. That white surface contains everything in potential: my deepest emotions, the calm in my head, the colours and the structures. It is one vast cloud of probabilities.

The moment I enter the quantum sea of my canvas and apply the first paint with a focused push, I notice that I am causing that wave to collapse. Through my directed willpower and physical labour, I force the invisible energy in my head to solidify into fixed, three-dimensional matter. On the canvas I am literally doing live what the cosmos constantly does at a subatomic level: creating reality out of nothing.

My Own Breaking Point as a Law of Nature

I have experienced in my own body what it means to push until you collapse. In the past I separated that inner stress from the outside world, but now that I work with paint, I see that everything is one continuous fabric. The pent-up energy that escalated in my own nervous system into a yield point and ultimately into my breaking point, my burnout, obeys exactly the same laws as a geyser in Iceland.

The gravity of the world, or of my own convictions, pressed the matter straight downward. The internal friction of everything I was trying to carry at the time—the fluid dynamics of Stokes—generated immense heat and pressure beneath the surface. Through the Lagrangian, which dictates that energy always follows the path of least resistance, the system had no choice but to tear open. My burnout was the eruption; nature pulling the emergency brake because the pressure had become too great.

At the time, I knew none of this because my body had entered a state of fight-or-flight. I only came to understand it over the past few months, when I found myself, entirely spontaneously, painting seven canvases inspired by the Field and by the interconnectedness of all that is.

The laws of physics gradually led me to the conclusion that everything is indeed one. As I see it, nothing can ultimately be proven within a three-dimensional reality, because that reality cannot fully account for a five-dimensional existence. To prove anything, one would first have to begin in the quantum field. And this is what I keep noticing: the quantum field itself cannot be proven through three-dimensional thinking.

Anyway…

This was years ago. Today, that destructive vortex has completely disappeared. I am now entirely zen, centred on a little cloud and connected to a beautiful field of grass. When I paint now, I find my transformation there. I channel the calm of my own inner peace directly into the viscosity of the oil paint. My history with the breaking point has now become a geological, stable underlayer on the canvas. The heavy layers I apply slow down time according to the laws of Einstein’s relativity, while the dynamic upper layer,  the beautiful, vast grass field beneath a radiant sun with bright flowers, celebrates my recovered energy.

The Creative Eruption: Energy Is Neutral

While the laws of physics reveal themselves to me so clearly, I suddenly understand my own feeling on a deeper level. A new eruption is presenting itself within me. But where an eruption used to be synonymous with collapse and destruction, I now feel something entirely different: an infinite creativity and liveliness begins to arise.

This is the ultimate quantum insight: energy is, at its core, completely neutral. An eruption is nothing other than a huge, sudden displacement of energy that breaks through a boundary. The direction that energy takes depends entirely on the state of the system.

When I became destructively stuck, my system was closed. I kept the lid on the pan until everything exploded. But now that my system is open, flexible and in balance, that rising current no longer collides with rigid resistance. I am now like a geyser in its purest, freest form. The energy boils over with enthusiasm and sprays directly onto the canvas. This is the eruption of spring: the violent, magnificent moment in which a seed tears open under the pressure from within, not in order to die, but to come into bloom in total aliveness. The breaking point is no longer my enemy; it is the gate through which my life force flows.

The Infinite Flow

My burnout, the reaching of my absolute limit, was not a personal failure or a final destination. It was nature’s Lagrangian way of restoring balance in my energy system. The cosmos temporarily forced my resistance to zero, allowing my inner structure to rebuild itself in the lee, molecule by molecule, into the calm and creative primordial force I now experience.

Today, that force no longer seeks an outlet through collapse, but through creation. Every painting has become an expression of the same infinite flow that shapes geysers, flowers, galaxies and human consciousness alike. I no longer paint nature as something outside myself; I experience that I am nature expressing itself through my hands. The energy that once consumed me has become the very source from which I create. Every canvas is both an exploration and a confirmation that nothing exists in isolation, that everything belongs to one continuous movement, and that the invisible field from which all things arise is not somewhere beyond us, but something we participate in with every breath, every gesture and every brushstroke.