Volvox

Bruce Pollock often works in layers, painting one image on top of another.  Then, he selectively sands through the surface to reveal something of each picture.  Looking at Volvox is like peering through the view screen of a starship at a giant nebula in a field of strange galaxies. 

But the title hints that the intended scale may be quite different.  The volvox is a tiny spherical organism that lives its brief life in freshwater streams.  The spirals in Pollock‘s painting might refer to these algae.  The artist's actual imagery source, however, was the tiny tracing of bubbles made by atomic particles that physicists see in their "cloud chamber" detectors.

Whether we read Volvox as a microcosm or a macrocosm, we are delving into the mystery of what Pollock calls “the inhabitants and landscapes at the periphery of normal vision."