David Alderman Arts

09/30/2026

Fear mode runs for seconds. You've run it for years.

I spent years in neuroscience before I came back to painting, and this particular thing still sits with me in a way I can't fully shake.

The stress response was designed for a burst. A predator, a few seconds, then done, the alarm shuts off and the body resets.

A lot of the collectors and architects I talk to have been running the alarm for years without realizing it.

The trade the body makes is pretty consistent: it pulls resources from maintenance to fund escape. Sleep goes first, then digestion, then the immune system, quietly bleeding in both directions while the system waits for a threat that never leaves.

Repair never gets scheduled because the body never gets the all-clear.

That's a physical state. And physical states can shift.

Wind is a painting about weather, and weather cycles. I made it partly because of this. Storms end.

The body knows how to end them too. It's just waiting on a signal that your environment keeps delaying.

When was the last time yours actually got one?

09/23/2026

The Four Pillars

A brush loaded unevenly drops more pigment in one corner.

That's what three hundred hours in one studio actually leaves behind.

My new collection is called The Four Pillars. Four paintings. Each one carries somewhere around three hundred hours of work, and that number isn't marketing. It's arithmetic.

The reason the surface does what it does comes down to something simple.

A screen emits light and refreshes sixty times a second. A painting holds light and stays still. Your nervous system evolved to read that difference, and it does it before you decide anything consciously.

Three things get registered before your eyes even finish focusing:

1. Microtexture.
2. Edge.
3. The variation where a brush loaded unevenly and left more pigment in one corner than another.

None of that is something a printer can fake or a screen can carry.

The brain takes in around eleven million bits per second and holds about fifty. A real hand-built surface gets through that filter in a way a screen can't, and I don't fully understand why that still surprises people who spend time around originals.

I build these faces from fractals of the amplituhedron. Hard edges, no blending, a thousand planes, so the geometry arrives as structure rather than decoration.

I should be straight about what that means. The amplituhedron is a conjecture that's passed a lot of checks. I won't tell you it's settled physics, because it isn't. What it is, is structural evidence that geometry sits at the base layer of how reality organizes itself, and I hold it there.

These four paintings reach toward teachings of the peoples who were here first. I didn't inherit those teachings. My relationship to them is an artist's honest fascination, and I won't wear a tradition that isn't mine.

What I built instead are four interfaces that carry that weight in a form a person walking past a wall can register without reading a single word.

Wind. The Listener. Reborn. The Graduate.

The order is specific and courageous.

I started painting in 1974, left, spent years studying neuroscience, built a few businesses, and came back to the studio with something I didn't have the first time around: the ability to say, specifically, why the room matters.

The body is the instrument. It reads the surface first, and the mind catches up later with a story about what just happened.

Three hundred hours of directed attention is a state, and that state leaves something in the paint that a viewer can detect without knowing how to name it.

08/25/2026

Getting closer! It’s all in the details…

08/25/2026

Slowing down changed how my paintings work on people's brains.

Someone told me if I were any slower, dirt would pass me by. They weren't wrong. Sunday in the studio, deep in detail work. Layers of oil, gouache, oil pastels rubbed in by hand. A single piece can take a week. Longer if I wander off to play guitar or just stare at the canvas for a while, which happens more than I'd say out loud.

Arthur Brooks talked about what fires in the right side of the brain when you make things by hand. It activates in a way that almost nothing else reaches. Unresolved thoughts find somewhere to land. The internal noise drops. I noticed this in myself long before I could name it.

I'm probably more anxious than I look. The work settles me. And when a painting ends up on someone's wall, something in that transfer carries. Mirror neurons, embodied cognition. The brain responds whether you're paying attention to it or not, and that part still gets me.

If you've ever stood in front of a piece of art and felt something shift, that shift was real. Your nervous system responded. Not as metaphor. As physiology. Have you felt that, and did you know what it was when it happened?

08/14/2026

08/14/2026

A painting is an interface between two nervous systems.

Last month I held the shutter open for a full minute and watched the sun come up over the water. Foam on the waves. That gray-pink sky right before dawn broke through.

I loved those photographs. I was there when they were taken.

The camera gave me its interpretation. Clean, fast, accurate to a fault. My nervous system wasn't in it anywhere.

So I'm doing something that makes no sense on paper. I'm taking those images back into the studio and applying my Quantism interface by hand. Three hundred hours, probably more.

Every brushstroke carries a decision my brain made. Color, pressure, geometry. The electrical field of my nervous system reorganizing itself in real time, on canvas. The shutter can't record that. It was open for a minute.

When you stand in front of the finished piece, your body reads it before your mind names it. Mirror neurons fire. The default mode network comes online. Cortisol drops. I don't know exactly how to quantify that, but I feel it every time I'm around original work.

Your nervous system reads three hundred hours of biological decision-making. That's the thing the camera couldn't do in sixty seconds.

The camera was there for sixty seconds. I'll be there for months, and my body will feel all of it.

Your nervous system registers that kind of time. I don't fully understand the mechanism, but Arthur Brooks explains it so elegantly. The paintings I've stood in front of longest were always the ones made slowly.

08/11/2026

https://youtu.be/WjesVScAPyY?is=4P3BtrF8Rc6zWipT

This is a song I wrote on Sunday. I thought I would play along a li...

08/11/2026

People know my paintings. Not this.

Sunday, I picked up a guitar instead of a brush. Wrote a song by the end of the afternoon. Here it is, before I talk myself out of sharing it.

People ask what I do besides paint. Usually I dodge the question.

Music and painting come from the same place for me. Rhythm, tension, release. The hands just hold a different tool.

Anyway. It's rough. I like it, not perfect.

Sound on. It is special to me.

08/11/2026

Your visual system starts scanning a wide canvas before you choose to look.

The same reflex your ancestors used to check the horizon for predators. It fires in you. Still. Right now.

The eye evolved to sweep left to right across open ground. That reflex is older than language, older than any tool ever made. The horizon is where threats showed up, so the nervous system learned to read it fast and wide.

A wide field triggers vigilance. A tall one pulls you into contemplation. Different neural states. Same person, different canvas shape.

I did not design SEVEN TWENTY SIX around this. I noticed it after the piece was already done.

The first two paintings from that weekend were vertical. Your eye climbs them the way it moves over a standing figure, top to bottom, taking in the form in sequence. This one is wider than it is tall. The eye does not climb it. It scans it.

The title is just a date. 7/26, the exact day the light hit the water. I label pieces the way a scientist labels a sample. It was calm that morning, still dark in the west, which has nothing to do with any of this.

The colors came from the same water as the vertical pieces. Oranges that push toward you. Purples that sit back. Blues that read wet even though there is no water in them.

But the geometry spread sideways. The amplituhedron forms distribute across the horizontal field the way objects actually sit on a real horizon. Your brain does not read them one cell at a time. It registers the whole field simultaneously, the same circuitry that fires when you stand on a beach and look out at the water.

That is why the beach settles something in you and you could never say why. The scan comes back clear. Nothing out there. The nervous system releases.

A wide painting on a wall does that same thing. Every time you walk past it. Not sometimes. Consistently, because the neurology does not change between the ocean and your living room.

The water was running this process before I ever picked up a brush. The painting gives your nervous system a surface to run it on indoors.

08/07/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1JToT9wfCr/?mibextid=wwXIfr