Silicone Nature #1 comes from a screenshot of a natural history illustration that I cropped quite abruptly from its original context. By isolating it, “nature” starts to feel unstable—less like something that exists on its own, and more like something constructed through images and narratives. The source image already acts as a kind of image donor—something taken and re-used rather than created from scratch. At the same time, the painting returns to my earlier interest in thick, heavy paint application, here using a silicone-based rocky texture given by a friend, functioning as a kind of matter donor. The material carries a prior life before entering the work, so both image and matter arrive already loaded. The creatures—insects, butterflies, and caterpillars —are treated less as specific species and more as dense image-objects. The painting moves between composition and improvisation, but also becomes very physical and weighted. In this sense, “nature” is not something organic or given, but something assembled—built from borrowed images and donated matter, where what we see is less a natural scene and more a constructed condition.