About

I’m an aspiring philosopher, painter, photographer, novelist, musician, and the occasional creator of luxury furniture.

Born in Romania in the mid-seventies, I was there exposed to a wide diversity of environments during my formative years, this before moving to the US as a kid in the early 80s: from spending time with relatives in the idyllic countrysides along the Carpathian Mountains and the Danube River to partaking of the bustle in the capital. Within the capital, I mingled as a child with academics and artists, some of which were family, others whose works I was exposed to through family members. To this effect, my mother graduated from the Academy of Arts, while my father was a systems analyst.

As to art in general, I was about four years old when I first grasped the significant role which it can have.

There was then a large earthquake, catastrophic for many, including two very loved, close friends of the family, newlyweds, who passed away buried under a mound of bricks that had fallen from a building. The following night, I saw my mother tirelessly paint a canvas nearly as tall as herself—the canvas resting on our apartment floor with its back leaning against the wall—using both paintbrushes and her fingertips, and with tears carefully restrained within her eyes. When I woke up the next day, I saw what my mom had spent the entire night painting: the heads of two wild horses with necks and manes entwined, each brightly colored against a background of darkness, each having human eyes—a representation of my mother’s two close friends. The painting wasn’t commissioned, nor was it for sale. It was the personal expression of an idea held at heart, one entwined with vast pools of emotion. And the work was to me beautifully magnificent.

As I’ve said, this experience left a lasting impact. Since then, I’ve generally thought of artistic manifestations in the same manner: expressions of concepts and states of being for which one either lacks the words to communicate in ordinary language or else just doesn’t want to, but, nevertheless—either consciously or unconsciously—yet finds oneself completed to externalize.

On the other side of things, more in line with my father’s character, there’s the science-loving, analytical part of me. Rather than comic books, I nerdishly read Darwin, Einstein, and the likes in high school for fun, this in addition to fictional works of all kinds. While at the University of California at Irvine, after changing my major from biology to cognitive sciences, I completed independent research projects as an undergraduate concerning the evolution of the human smile and, more broadly, of facial expressions in general. The results I obtained were excellent—with one experiment (which evidenced that the eyes are more important than the mouth in human’s nonverbal communications) having a probability of being wrong equivalent to 0.000, the maximum that was reported. My father’s untimely death due to a sudden heart attack shortly after my graduation from UCI and the ensuing responsibilities I then had to assume, however, cut short my ambitions to formally publish these results in scientific journals and to go on to graduate school. Despite this, I’ve remained an avid reader of science and philosophy, more recently doing my best to finalize the insights I’ve gained along the way via my own philosophical work: An Enquiry into the Nature of Being.

Looking back upon my life, I can confidently affirm that it’s been a turbulent mixture of elements, some extremely positive, others … well, not so much. From these, I find that I’ve gained a great many stories to tell—timid though I typically am about telling them—together with a deeper appreciation for life’s vastly differing aspects.

My explorations of the aesthetic and the more scientific, analytical aspects of reality stem from this, here briefly highlighted, background. The blending of creativity and enquiry is my ideal way to be, my modus operandi, so to speak: an important nourishment though which the sweetness of life can be tasted despite the sorrows and strifes—one that provides me the fuel for both my philosophical understandings and as well as my more artistic expressions.

As a closing comment:

I uphold that love is essential to life, whereas hate is an unnecessary consequence of the former.

Love, minimally in some form of self-love, is required for life to continue living. Hate will then occur as one of many possible means of defending that which is loved—this, at minimum, being the identity of the very person(s) which actively hate. Unlike dyads such as those of up and down—these being dual elements that cannot occur in the absence of its opposite—love and hate do not form an inseparable duality. Whereas the occurrence of hate will always be dependent on the presence of some form of love, love can not only occur but can thrive in the complete absence of all hatred.

Because of this, and as hard as this ideal might be to accomplish, to me there’s a great deal of worthwhile truth to be found in the phrase, “all you need is love”.

Symbol of: “Peace, Love, and Understanding”

(a glyph I’ve created that is now public domain and downloadable at https://commons.wikimedia.org by typing the title in the search field | or, more simply, by clicking the image above)