When I was a kid riding in the back seat of the family car, I’d watch the side of the road and by closing one eye, would align the bottom of the window with the rush of horizontals speeding past.

Fence tops, walls and guard rails formed an oscillating horizontal line that danced with the unchanging bottom of the window frame. For me, this was close enough to the infinity of LINE described in my geometry schoolbooks.

Once introduced to the iconic shapes and solids in those books, I saw them everywhere, mental templates to be superimposed on any scene. The overlay of geometric ideals transformed a baseball into the perfect sphere, a building block into the flawless cube.

A family car ride was often headed to the beach. On a foggy day, my side window view might offer a bonus: with ocean and sky now a uniform tone, the horizon was gone. It was still there of course, but only as a mental image. I had found another conceptual game; my memory was another template superimposed onto what I actually saw.

The SOLID AND SPACE pictures celebrate this play between intellectual and perceptual knowledge, the flickering between memory and observation, the blend of mystery and delight when truth and truth disagree.

All images ©Bill O’Donnell