Recent paintings by Rudy Rucker. Inspired by my sojourns in the lands of math and literature. Images are Copyright (C) Rudy Rucker, 2026. For more info on Rudy’s art, go to his Paintings Page.

I’ll be talking about this stuff, and selling prints, at a Dorkbot event on February 25 at the Monkeybrains building at 933 Treat Ave between 22nd and 23rd streets in the Mission. I’ll be selling high-quality prints at the show.

291. The Light
Acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 30″. January, 2026

Brilliant sunlight and fresh grass on the bluffs overlooking Three Mile beach north of Cruz.-I love how the light fully illuminates the substance of the grass blades, lighting them up as if they’re stained-glass windows. And I have this recurring mystical sense that there is a higher SUN in, let us say, the fourth dimension, and its glow permeates each of our bodies inside and out. And this shared illumination is the essence of our souls. And all these souls are as one.

290. Dusk
Acrylic on canvas, 30″ x 24″. January, 2026

Acrylic on canvas, 30″ x 24″. January, 2026
I like to walk in some hills above my house in Los Gatos. I was up there with daughter Isabel, and one winter afternoon we noticed this beautiful oak tree, with the moon in the background. I was able to paint it pretty rapidly, with thick brush strokes, going back to it once or twice to get it right. I used an early version of it as my e-mailed new year’s card for 2026. I considered putting in some flying saucers, but in the end it seemed perfect just the way it was.-

289. Kawaii
Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 24″. December, 2025

I had a nice square canvas, and a lot of fresh paint on my palette, so I decided to cover the blank canvas with lines. Initially the canvas was in a position where those lines were vertical. It was fun and easy to keep refining the lines with loose, full-armed strokes, using two different-sized brushes. And then I wondered if the painting might be done. I wasn’t sure. But then I rotated the canvas by ninety degrees so the lines were horizontal; and — aha! A sunset. I’d been wanting to paint an ocean sunset. I’d just been on a beach trips with Barb, to Moss Landing, near Monterey. And here was my ocean sunset. But it didn’t have enough. It needed critters. I let the painting sit around the house for a couple of months until I could see them. Seals! I looked at some photos of seals, but, by way of repeated revisions, made mine simpler than life. Cute seals. For the title, I went of the Japanese word “kawaii,” which means something like cute, but in a special Japanese sense. I think it’s pronounced a little like “Hawaii.”

286. New Friends
Acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 30″. October, 2025

I wanted a loose, semi-abstract painting. I wanted a composition where we have some critters at the bottom looking through a door or a windshield, or over a wall, and seeing a different type of critter, perhaps in another world. In New Friends I was initially thinking of a big aquarium tank butted up against a zoo cage, and each group is seeing the others as entertainment. But then I was thinking more of a jungle scene, with two groups in the open air, encountering each other, and hoping to be friends. I used my trick of having the critters emerge like Rorschach test results from blobs I’d made. And I liked the idea of giving almost every one of them an eye. As for the sea anemone or campfire at the bottom, well, that’s an extra I wanted to see.

285. The Fall of the Rebel Angels
Acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 30. Oct, 2025

I love Peter Bruegel’s painting, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, a fantastical and realistic masterpiece that shows a hundred misshapen creatures tumbling down from heaven. I was working on my novel Sqinks, with a zillion odd aliens are swooping around. I thought of Bruegel’s painting, and I tried to paint a copy for inspiration. But that’s far beyond my skills. I went abstract, and filled a canvas with gauzy figures in shades of green, pink, yellow, blue, and orange. One is indeed modeled on a Bruegel fallen angel. It’s is halfway up of the left, and resembles a bursting seed pod. I showed my first version of the painting to my artist pal Vernon Head, and he said, “This is great, it’s like a Willen de Kooning, you should leave it just the way it is.” I was happy he said that, but I was tempted to keep going, and to start outlining things, the way I like to do. As a compromise, I only outlined the figures in the lower part of the painting. I see those guys as the creatures who are allowed to remain in heaven, and the evicted ones are the gauzy figures in the upper half. I see them as farther away, and in motion. The red arc across the canvas might be the edge of a cliff, or the rim of a planet. Or maybe it’s the lower edge of a UFO’s windshield. So our viewpoint would be with the aliens in the cockpit. Mathematical logic, right?

284. My Shadow
Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 30. July, 2025

Here I am in my studio, that is, in my parched back yard. The sun is high overhead. Thei summer-nuked lawn is yellow, with dead straw and few green blades. I’m holding my phone camera with both hands, with my elbows sticking out. You can see my lower legs, my shoes, and the short, dark shadow of my body. My pants have smears of paint on them. The articulation of the legs, shoes, and shadows is a bit tricky but, once you know what you’re looking at, it seems logical. At least to me. I have a PhD in an arcane field knows as Mathematical Logic. The other day I was talking with my friend Barb, and I was making some outrageous claim, and I insisted, “It’s simple logic.” And then I had to stop and think, and I admitted, “Well, it’s mathematical logic.” Which is not the average person’s notion of logic at all.

2282. Oxbow River
Acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 30. June, 2025

I saw this view from a plane while flying east from San Francisco and passing over the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta. The multifarious winding streams in this area have oxbows, that is, bulges where the river may or may not pinch off into an oxbow lake. Fan of gnarl that I am, I love looking down at this area from a plane. The great modern California artist Wayne Thiebaud painted this region many times. It’s an inexhaustible motif. One thing I like here is the contrast between the orderly polygonal fields and the twisty river streams¬¬—mirroring the split between digital and analog, computer and soul, word and image. Gnarly, dude.

281. Hvalfisk
Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 18. June, 2025

Abstraction. Color harmony. I added the two eye-circles at the end. I always like painting eyes and flying saucers and tentacles. And once the first eye was in place, I was thinking of sea creatures or, more specifically, whales. The title? In Norwegian, “hvalfisk” means “whale fish,” or simply “whale.” And this happens to be a word I sometimes like to yell when I’m alone on the beach, using the accent of my Norwegian friend Gunnar.

278. The Lovers
Acrylic on canvas, 30″ x 24″. May, 2025

I’m imagining a pair of lovers spiraling down¬—a cosmic gateway? Ecstasy? Who knows. They look like they’re getting a little smoother on the way down, like rocks tumbled in the sea. I like the way the two lovers are cruising along. I did the yellow background with finger-painting, an effect I sometimes use. That is, I squirted blobs of four different yellows and smeared them around, wearing my latex painting gloves. Getting the right reds and blues fort the lovers took me some time. Shade, saturation, and value¬—all three have to be harmony. Another challenge for The Lovers was to get the geometry right! I would say they’re moving along a helix that has increasing torsion—in the sense of being more and more stretched out, like a Slinky being pulled straight. I worked it out by eye, with plenty of do-overs.

275. Mayan Codex
Acrylic, 30″ x 24″ canvas. February, 2025

My friend Barb and I took a vacation trip to the Yucatan in Mexico. The beaches and skies and towns and jungles were amazing. Everyone was nice. We spent a day at Chichen Itza which made a huge impression on me, with its big square-topped pyramid and its many glyphs with Mayan pictographs. I knew I wanted to paint these. Barb and I took photos. I felt like we were cosmopolitans in a Fellini movie. Back at home I found a couple of websites with simplified images of the pictographs. I wasn’t sure how I’d use them, bus I just started, and kept going, and this is what I ended up with. I like it a lot, and it made me happy to work on it . Generally all the people in Mayan pictograms face left, but I turned a couple of them around for variety. And I put in a couple of snakes or crocodiles. The Mayans have an important plumed serpent god, Kukulkan. And they love depicting skulls. I used the cool word “codex” because there exist some illustrated documents illustrating Mayan and Aztec temple art. My beloved beatnik author William Burroughs revered these records.

274. Scary Beach
Acrylic, 30″ x 24″ canvas. December, 2024

I don’t remember exactly what got me started on this painting. I guess I wanted to do a painting, and lacking any better idea, I decided to go for a giant tentacled creature from the sea. With tall buildings on the beach, like you might have at Miami. With an alien attack scenario. And then my big brother Embry was suddenly dying of cancer. It came on very quickly. I flew back to Louisville, with my son Rudy Jr. along, and we had a chance to say our goodbyes to Embry. He was very weak. It was good to be together. I held his hand for a long time, and he told me his whole life was flashing before his eyes, bouncing around, and he liked that. So strange and sad to reach this milestone. Embry and I were little boys together, seventy-five years ago—and now I thought of us as little boys in the woods with something scary drawing near. The day after I got back to California, Embry was dead, and I went back, this time with daughters Georgia and Isabel. It was a big funeral, with many familiar faces from the old, old times. I got it together to deliver a eulogy. Back home I didn’t know what to do with myself. I picked up my half-done painting and finished it. That gravestone monster with the big teeth emerged, and it made sense for me to paint that. You might say it’s Death itself.

263. Halloween
Acrylic, 24″ x 20″ canvas. October, 2024

I started with random blobs from my palette. For a couple of months I thought this was a decent abstract painting, but then I wanted to paint some more, so I studied the blobs, looking for images, and I found a way to crop down a blob to get that big, crooked critter in the middle. I was working on my novel Sqinks, which features some bad aliens called Mu9ers. I turned the other blobs into shambling zombie-like figures like the one in the middle, ending up with a posse of invading Mu9ers. Rather than putting pupil-dots in the white eye-disks, I left them blank, so they’re like goggles. I used six different shades of orange and yellow for the background, creating a lively Hell-scape feel. Clearly this is a Halloween painting, but I hoped it would help me write another chapter about the Mu9ers in my novel.

266. Farmers Market
Acrylic, 30″ x 24″ canvas. January, 2024

I kept thinking about some new aliens I was going to call sqinks. I formed the notion that the sqinks might be trading or shopping at a farmers market here. What would they want? Perhaps fresh fruit and vegetables, which are among the most unique treasures that a planet has to offer. To liven things up I added two more alien races that you might call happies and spikes. The aliens are emerging from an underground portal system, with volcano-like exits. I like the colors and the crowded feel of this one—perhaps a bit like a scene from my beloved Bruegel.

265. Riding the Flat Cows
Acrylic, 40″ x 30″ canvas. November, 2023

In 2013 I painted 160: Flat Cow, showing a squashed-flat flying cow that appears in my novel Million Mile Road Trip. The flat cows amuse me, so I painted a couple more of them here, adding a spacefarer couple and three odd critters (not our children). I call the purple ones “sqinks” because it’s a creepy word. And it’s always fun to have a planet in the background. I this image for my 2023 Christmas e-card. And what’s going on in this scene? Who knows. Oh, and I’m thinking those warped little rectangles are teleportation portals..

262. Dating
Acrylic, 30″ x 24″ canvas. October, 2023

This is what you might call a Rorschach painting. I use my old disposable paper palette like a stamp, putting patterns on the new canvas. And then I paint what I see. That green thing in the middle was the first to appear, and I thought of the grill of a particular kind of car, the 1956 Edsel. So the initial title for the painting was Wrecked Edsel. I added a tire, a gearshift knob, some kind of controller box, plus a couple of headlights which, in the end, look more like flowers. Plus a guitar—perhaps it was in the back And a Rudy-standard the blob with an eye. An alternate interpretation came to me: Online Dating. I had lost my wife, and I was trying, with little pleasure or success, to find a woman friend. And it occurred to me that my messy, disorganized image symbolized, in some way, dating. Note here that the candidates group into four pairs!

260. Cyberpunk Forever
Acrylic, 40″ x 30″ canvas. August, 2023

A painting like this is an exercise in balancing the forms, hues, sizes, and values of brightness. It took me a long time, with multiple revisions. I needed to stay continually open to revising major parts of it. By the end I was glad I was done, but it was worth it. I find the work pleasing to look at. A flag to celebrate my way of seeing things: Cyberpunk Forever.

253. Neuron
Acrylic, 40″ x 30″ canvas. May, 2023

I started with the reddish blob in the center, and went on from there, first adding an orange edge, then putting green outside the edge, and then coming up with a network of yellow dots connected by purple tubes. I began thinking of this as an image of a neuron in your brain, with its connective synapses. And of course I was inspired by the then-current work on artificial neural networks as a path to AI. These networks have a flaw, in that no processing is taking place within the individual artificial neurons. So inspired by a paper by Stephen Wolfram, I went ahead and put a cellular-automaton-like pattern inside the neuron—so that it can “think” on its own. But mainly this painting is about richly interacting colors.

249. The One
Acrylic, 30″ x 24″. May, 2023

I was hiking with a friend, and we were talking about gnarl, and the nature of mind, and of higher consciousness. When we lay down on a rock to rest, I was thinking about the cosmic One being present in every part of nature. So this painting shows a person looking at a flower, with a divine eye nearby. Instead of having the person look like me, I had them be a woman. I was thinking of my recently lost wife. It seemed fitting to show her laid out with a flower, and with the divine One nearby. You might even call this a painting of heaven.

247. Empty Mind
Acrylic, 28″ x 22″. April, 2023

I did my reuse-the-paint-on-the-palette-from-the-previous-painting routine for the background. And I put lots of circles on top. I considered leaving the circles blank and empty, but it’s more fun to see a lot of eyes. I wasn’t thinking much of anything while I made Empty Mind, I was just painting, letting it come out. I enjoyed the process itself, as a way to get away from the raw and heavy grief I was experiencing. I thought of book called The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind, by D. T. Suzuki. I never read much of that book— it’s extremely technical and philosophical, almost like Hegel or Kant, but I was always amused by the title. The eyeballs are mirrors of the ongoing empty mind of the cosmos—quite unrelated to our individual fates. The world just going on.

244. The Same Yet Changed I Rise Again
Acrylic, 28″ x 22″. Mar, 2023

I started with a background that I created by pressing my used-up paper palette against the canvas. When I do this, I don’t smear the palette around, I use it like a stamp, pressing it repeatedly. Then I touch up all the blank spots. And then I painted the simples possible thing I could think of. The so-called logarithmic spiral or growth spiral, similar to the one seen in nautilus shells. It was extensively investigated in the 17th Century by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli who wanted it inscribed on his tombstone with the Latin phrase “Eadem mutata resurgo,” which means “The same yet changed, I rise again.” This phrase is a personal touchstone of mine, and I always invoke it when stating a new project, or a new phase of my life.

242. Whoop-Di-Doo
Acrylic, 24″ x 30″. Jan, 2023

I wanted to get away from narration. My wife was in her last weeks, dying on a hospital bed in our living room, and we knew what was coming, even though at some level we didn’t know. Couldn’t visualize it. Taking solace in math, I decided to paint an intricate image that I found with a cubic Mandelbrot set algorithm that I unearthed some years ago. The interesting thing here is that there are two nested spirals. One goes in from the left, the other goes out the right. They meet at that yellow dot in the center. Like death and rebirth. And that lively green triangle at the lower right? That’s paradise, the garden of Eden. The term whoop-di-doo is used by skaters, snowboarders, and bicyclists to describe a funky twirl.

241. Math
Acrylic, 40″ x 30″. Dec, 2022.

Sometimes I just paint a nice background and scatter things across it. Here I used about four different shades of yellow. I laid the canvas on the ground and squirted on yellow blobs from above, along with globs of buff white along with impasto medium. I smeared it around, being careful not to overdo the smearing. I didn’t want to homogenize it; I wanted the seething push-pull of the varying shades. That swoop in the middle is a shape from Wassily Kandinsky. And I added various shapes that are (or might be) from mathematics. Balancing the colors and inventing fake symbols was a big part of this.

237. New Glasses
Acrylic, 24″ x 18″. November 2022

I was in the process of buying new lenses for two pairs of glasses, and the lenses were unbelievably expensive, and then I had to get them redone. When things bug me, I try to make art from experience. So…what if my so-called glasses were some kind of teep aid, or empathy receiver, or pheromone sniffer, or vibe feeler. Suppose that, wearing them, I sense something unusual. Ghosts, aliens, creatures from the subdimensions. The experience ruins me, and I end up like those unfortunates I saw writhing in the alley behind the optician, the degens known as snorkers. Idea for a story? But too much trouble to write it. So I painted the view through the…new glasses. With the glasses in front of the bookcase in my office. My nephew bought the painting almost right away. He said I should do a second painting, in which you see the books through the lenses, and you see those fractal land-and-water patterns outside the lenses. It would be a whole different scenario, with the glasses an island of sanity, as opposed to a door into madness. But, yeah, in the story the guy could flip from one to the other. Hmm. Maybe someday.

236. Going to Heaven
Acrylic, 30″ x 24″, October, 2022

The two space jellies are poised at start of a great adventure. I think of them as a couple, about to die one by one, and eventually going to heaven. The hazy shape around the star was inspired by a photo of the Tarantula Nebula. I gave each of the jellies two eyes, so they can be looking at two different things: here it’s each other and their goal. I put a green border around the jellyfish eyes. And the target star has a dot of green at its center. And my signature is green as well.

Images are Copyright (C) Rudy Rucker, 2026. For more info on Rudy’s art, go to his Paintings Page.

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This is part 2 of a long blog post. The first part is called “Wandering” and this part is “Wondering.” No real reason for those names, just playing with words. But mostly these posts are about images.

Kawaii. Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 24″. December, 2025

At one point, I had a nice square canvas, and a lot of fresh paint on my palette, so I decided to cover the blank canvas with lines. Initially the canvas was in a position where those lines were vertical. But then I rotated the canvas by ninety degrees so the lines were horizontal; and — aha! A sunset. I’d been wanting to paint an ocean sunset like I’d seen at Moss Landing, and here it was. But it didn’t have enough. It needed critters. I let the painting sit around the house for a couple of months until I could see…seals! I made mine simpler than life. Cute seals. For the title, I went for the Japanese word “kawaii,” which means something like cute, but in a special Japanese sense. I think it’s pronounced a little like “Hawaii.”

I was here just the other day. Lexington Reservoir near Los Gatos. I’d just been up at a tree farm with Rudy’s family, and we stopped at Lexington to make sure Rudy’s tree wasn’t going to slide off. Sunsets…so obvious, so transcendent.

Rudy is interested in mushrooms, in a botanist kind of way, and here he’s using one as an umbrella. Up at the tree farm.

The tree meets its doom…or its elevation to iconic status!

This month we’re having a new retaining wall installed. Big, big job with many stages. Note the I-beams. I like this shot of the moon and, beneath it, the planet Venus.

Sawed-off tips of the “lags,” like railroad ties, which are to be stacked into the grooves on the sides of the I-beams.

With daughter Isabel on a hill above where we live.

Equipment for drilling the holes where the I-beams went. I love helix shapes.

Wedding With Cat. Acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 30″. November, 2025

One of my collectors, Julian Reschke, approached me with the proposal that I do a painting for his upcoming wedding to the woman he’d been living with for many years. We discussed possibilities, and he sent me some photos of him, his lady, and their one-eyed cat. I was eager to start work, but I didn’t have a blank 40″ x 30″ canvas. Rather than waiting for one to arrive by mail, I decided to paint over a recent work, Eye Candy, letting the green rivers become bodies. As I’m by no means a skilled portrait painter, I chose to model the faces on Picasso images. And I found a fun way to depict a one-eyed cat. I wasn’t sure if my friends would like the work, but they did.

Spring in November. Acrylic on canvas, 22″ x 28″. November, 2025

As I often do, I started my next work with abstract patterns drawn from the paints still on the palette from the previous work, that is, Wedding with Cat. . I had a lot of nice blues and greens, as if for a beautiful spring day with gentle skies and budding plants. And that was indeed the weather we were having just then, even though it was November. That’s California! I wanted something on top of that, so I drew dark lines in a kind of pictogram animal shape. I went over the lines three or four times until I got just the right colors and brightness. And then some flowers/eyes came it. I spent a last day refining the edges of the dark shape, making sure it didn’t run off the edges, or get too thick.

Isabel held an event at rudy Jr’s Monkeybrains headquarters in the Mission. Isabel and I were to be talking about the nature of time. And somehow Barb had a made a photo of a warped clock with a tossed potato in front of it…I think that’s Rudy’s hand. We have fun, our clan.

Rudy’s warehouse is another spot where I like to take photos. This is some electrical thingie that resembles a gnarly bug. I tweaked the perspective sliders to make sure the background lines are at right angles.

During the covid plague, Rudy bought an old school bus, which was retrofitted as a camper. He and his family, all five of them drove across the country and back, visiting friends and relatives, and sleeping in the bus. It’s still parked behind the Monkeybrains building, with a sky hole on the roof.

As I’ve mentioned, I did a Kickstarter for my novel Sqinks. Here I’m an uncut raw SF dealer heading for the post office. Took a couple of months for my back to recover.

Barb and Rudy at a cheap ocean-view motel in Santa Cruz.

Awesome car show in the Cruz Boardwalk parking lot. I love those ’30s hotrods.

Barg’s photo of an exceedingly long-lived orchid at my house.

Barb and Rudy dressed for Halloween. I’m an artist, right (these being my regular painting clothes), and Barb is a North African dancer.

One more photo of my Sqinks stash. They’re not selling particularly well, but at least I wrote the book, and got some money, and it’s out there published.

New Friends, Acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 30″. October, 2025

I was initially thinking of a big aquarium tank butted up against a zoo cage, and each group is seeing the others as entertainment. But then I was thinking more of a jungle scene, with two groups in the open air, encountering each other, and hoping to be friends. I used my trick of having the critters emerge like Rorschach test results from blobs I’d made. And I liked the idea of giving almost every one of them an eye. As for the sea anemone or campfire at the bottom, well, that’s an extra I wanted to see.

Barb and I went hiking at Abbotts Lagoon in Point Reyes National Seashore. A very long hike through sand and ponds, completely deserted most of the way, but then a huge group of people showed up, some kind of expedition. About half of them undressed and marched into the very cold Pacific together. Barb, who is more talkative than I am, approached a member of the troupe to find out what was up. They were members of an entrepreneur-ship workshop at Stanford!

This display of Tibetan artifacts at the Asian Art Museum…it blows my mind. That apron thingie is carved from some one person’s bones, and if you wear it, you can fly.

Another dawn shot of Tomales Bay. Love the touches of pink.

I’ve been hanging around with Barb Ash a lot. I published Sqinks. I painted quite a bit. I’ll break my doings into two posts: “Wandering” and “Wondering.”

Barb is a photographer, as am I, and we enjoy working on pictures together, each using their own camera, but helping each other see. Barb is better at focusing than I am. This is her shot of sunset at Moss Landing. We were down there for a whale watching trip, spending three nights while we were at it.

Made a visit to the Asian Art Museum in SF. I like this guy, he makes me laugh. D.T. Suzuki wrote a book called The Zen Doctrine of No Mind.

Amazing demon sculpture from, I think, Tibet.

Down in Santa Cruz with Barb, near the Boardwalk. I love the zigzag shadow.

Barb by the chimneys in Moss Landing. Looking kinda cyberpunk. This used to be a fuel-burning power plant, but now it isn’t. I think they do something having to do with solar power there.

I never tired of the living mandalas of yuccas and such succulents.

Asian art museum: Ganesh the elephant god. I’ve always loved this guy.

Halloween pumpkins with Barb. The one on the left is mine; I carve him the same every year.

The Fall of the Rebel Angels, Acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 30″. October, 2025

I love Peter Bruegel’s painting, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, a fantastical and realistic masterpiece that shows about a hundred misshapen creatures tumbling down from heaven. I was working on my novel Sqinks, in which a zillion of odd aliens are swooping around. And I thought of Bruegel’s painting, and I tried to paint a copy of it for inspiration. Quickly I realized a precise copy would be far beyond my skills. So I went semi-abstract, and filled a canvas with gauzy figures in shades of green, pink, yellow, blue, and orange. One of the figures is indeed modeled on a specific Bruegel fallen angel. This one is halfway up of the left, and resembles a bursting ripe seed pod. I only outlined the figures in the lower part of the painting. I see those guys as the creatures who are allowed to remain in heaven, and the evicted ones are the gauzy figures in the upper half. You might think of them as farther away. And the red arc might be thought of as edge of a cliff, or the rim of a planet.

A pan shot of my office. I always have a bunch of my recent paintings on the walls. But I’m always making new ones so they don’t get to stay up all that long. I especially like that one in the middle.

Eye Candy. Acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 30″. June, 2025

This is based on a photo taken from a plane over the California region called the Delta. In this one, I was interested in the delicate gradations of yellow among the slightly different fields. And I emphasized the islands within the oxbows. To liven them the image, I filled the islands with circles. Wanting to make something that’s fun to look at. Eye candy! Somewhat foolishly, I painted over this a few weeks later, because I was desperate for a fresh canvas, and didn’t want to wait a week for a new one to arrive in the mail.

Mannequins in empty store windows are always creepy and surreal. Especially if they don’t have heads!

Att the annual St. Mary’s School Fair in Los Gatos. A saucer ride! I guess that once a bunch of people are inside, it spins around. Not for me! But I love the way it looks.

My Shadow. Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 30″. July, 2025

Here I am in my studio, that is, in my parched back yard. It’s two in the afternoon of a full-on sunny day. Thei summer-nuked lawn is yellow clay, with dead straw and few green blades. I’m holding my phone camera with both hands, which is why you see my elbows sticking out. I’m photographing my lower legs, my shoes, and the dark shadow of my body. My pants have lots of paint on them. The articulation of the legs, shoes, and shadows is a bit tricky but, once you know what you’re looking at, it seems logical. At least to me. I have a PhD in an arcane field knows as Mathematical Logic. The other day I was talking with my friend Barb, and I was making some outrageous claim, and I insisted, “It’s simple logic.” And then I had to stop and think, and I admitted, “Well, it’s mathematical logic.” Which may not the average person’s notion of logic at all.

The source photo for My Shadow. Part of painting is learning what things to leave out.

I think this one of the greatest photos I ever took. With my Leica. Walking down a street on Bernal Hill, it might have been on the Fourth of July.

In Chinatown with Barb. We like hanging around in North Beach these days. We’ve found a cheap hotel with free parking, and we like to dance in the bar/club called the Saloon. Supposedly the oldest bar in San Francisco. They have good live music. I love these old guys playing their own instruments on Grant Street.

Rudy & Penny’s twins, Jasper and Zimry, set off for college this fall. I remember their baby years and childhoods and teens so well. And now I’m nearly eighty. How time rolls on.

Barb shot of me in North Beach. She doesn’t like to crop, and maybe she’s right. We like the hills and the Vic houses of North Beach. And of course I like the sone’s history as a beatnik / artist enclave.

What I call a “Rudy picture.” Shapes and silhouettes and 3D.

Another Rudy picture from North Beach. I like that little wall around the base of the tree.

Flukes of a whale on our whale watching trip to Moss Landing. We saw about 30 whales over a couple of hours, they were right offshore. I was rereading Moby Dick around this time, and I liked it in that book when one of the old whalers, before going to bed, says, “I’m going to turn flukes.” This would be an expression, you understand, for a whale diving down deep.

We spent a couple of nights near Point Reyes Station in a motel next to Tomales Bay. So peaceful.

Now continue to the Wondering post, up next.

My new novel, and a journal about writing it. Published via my very own indie press,  which is Transreal Books.

I raised funds for it on a Kickstarter page…and I have a Sqinks book page..

Towards the end of Novembler, I’ll be publishing Sqinks and Sqinks Journal in hardback, paperback, and ebook on all the usual book sites.

For now, here’s a kinda funny promo / trailer video for the book that I made with the help of my friend Barb Ash.

It was fun doing the video, Barb got into it.

Sqinks is a visionary tale of aliens in today’s San Francisco. The sqinks. In some ways they’re like our new AIs. But in other ways, they’re a thing nobody’s ever seen. Nobody except Rudy. And, um, these aliens seem to have an interest in replacing human brains.  It’s a surreal rollercoaster, rich with ideas, scares, and laughs.

The narrator is, in a way, me. The character is a seasoned SF author who’s  writing a novel about the odd world he’s in. A touch of what I calls transrealism. Yes, it’s science-fiction, but, yes, it’s about our real world. And the lead woman character Carol Cee is pretty much my woman friend Barb Ash.

Me being who I am, the novel is cyberpunk—2020s style, faster and funnier than  before. New mind tech, and new struggles for human freedom.

And it’s a love story.  A transreal cyberpunk love story. It’ll make you laugh, and it’ll make you feel good.