Untitled, Tommy Hoppe, Graphite on Paper, 39"x 34"
It began on a four-foot sheet of paper in a barn in upstate New York. Graphite, compass, ruler, years of solitude. I started with many arms, many hands, elaborate forms, geometry everywhere. Too much. One by one I removed them: shaded out an arm, erased an ornament, buried fingers in gray. I simplified until only essentials remained. What survived was quiet, monumental, and somehow unfinished.
The work took four years, spanning my time in the barn and into New York. I gave it to my mother; she had it framed under the highest quality museum glass. I could borrow it anytime for exhibitions. The first time was at the Chelsea Art Museum. I put a price tag of $144,000 on it – not to sell, but to keep it safe. That night it caused a stir. People gathered around, raising voices, arguing over what the drawing was.
To me it was obvious. In my mind it had always been one thing, very specific. But to the audience, it was many things, each equally precise: A fiddle fig and an asian pear on a bed of sunflowers, an extreme close-up of a deflated balloon animal, a squid with a hairdryer, the top of an elaborately decorated cupcake, very full bagpipes, a sacrificial offering. Later my mother said flatly, “It’s a heart, obviously.” That was only the beginning.
From that show forward, I began documenting responses. Hundreds of them. Each viewer saw something different, and always with conviction. Online the same phenomenon continued: the guesses multiplied, none agreeing, all insistent. The drawing behaved like a mirror of memory. Ambiguity wasn’t blankness—it was a trigger.
Reduction and Ambiguity
Why did this happen? Partly because the drawing is pared down to essence. Specifics erased, detail withheld. By reducing the figure, I opened a space for projection. People don’t say, “I see a vague shape.” They say, “I see a Viking helmet.” Or “a cuttlefish with a little hand-puppet.” The mind doesn’t leave things undefined; it completes.
And there was another factor, more structural. The drawing is built entirely on the golden section. Every curve set with compass, every proportion aligned to the Fibonacci sequence, every arc in strict coherence with the major scale. It is literally composed as a piece of music. Natural forms – shells, leaves, bodies – follow the same mathematics. When people look, they are reminded of something they’ve already seen in nature. One of those resonances rises to the surface, and they name it.
The lotus is a clue. A lotus thrives on almost nothing. It needs only a little sludge at the bottom of a pond. In the same way, this drawing needs almost nothing to live: just a few coherent arcs and proportions. Out of reduction comes strength. Out of ambiguity, multiplicity.
The Golden Section Pivot
At a certain point in writing about this drawing, I withhold the name on purpose. The essay itself must follow the same form as the work: a delay, a suspension, a buildup, then a turn.
The drawing is called Ganesha.
An elephant, seated cross-legged on a lotus. His head rests in his lap. The trunk curls behind, the tusk is broken. He is dreaming the world into form.
When people finally hear the title, their perception flips. The ambiguous blur resolves into a figure. The many collapse into one. Recognition feels like waking from a dream.
After the Reveal
Once named, the drawing narrows. You can no longer “unsee” the elephant. The heart, the helmet, the squid – those vanish. Ambiguity is replaced by certainty. That’s the pivot. The image loses its multiplicity but gains identity. This trade is at the heart of perception.
Neuroscience explains the process: the brain loops ambiguous input through memory, the hippocampus searching for matches, the prefrontal cortex trying to categorize. At first, many possible matches compete. When the right pattern clicks, the system stabilizes. The image resolves, and the guessing stops. Recognition feels like truth, even though moments before there were dozens of competing truths.
This reversal matters. It demonstrates how perception works: not as a mirror of reality, but as a process of narrowing possibility. The same drawing can be a heart, a helmet, a squid, and then, finally, an elephant. The shift isn’t in the graphite; it’s in the mind.
Why It Matters
For me, Ganesha became an experiment in perception, a live test of how ambiguity and resolution play in the human mind. It taught me that reduction—removing the superfluous – creates space for imagination. It also showed how a single revelation can collapse that freedom into certainty.
This pattern, ambiguity to revelation, is the same rhythm I aim for in CR1, the system that unites color and music. Just as the drawing delays its subject until the golden section, CR1 withholds clarity until the moment of demonstration. The pivot is where meaning lands.
And at the root of it all is the point: art succeeds not by piling on specifics, but by removing them. By building on the simplest scaffolding—the golden section, the major scale – an image or a mode resonates with the countless natural forms already living in memory. The viewer does the rest.
What People Have Seen
Over the years, Ganesha has been called many things, often with conviction, always with specificity. A few favorites:
“It’s a bee, sleeping in a lotus flower.”
“A cuddlefish with a little handpuppet.”
“A deflated circus tent.”
“A wilted flower, zoomed way in.”
“A turkey fu**ing an umbrella.”
“A sunflower head covered by cloth and a leather bladder rested atop a sunflower seed tin.”
“A saint meditating on a Doric column.”
“A Viking helmet wrapped in a toga.”
“An octopus.”
“A huge shaped heart carefully placed on an antique bench waiting to be repaired.”
“A homunculus.”
“A Greek altar with a sacrificial offering on it.”
“A uterus on a pedestal.”
“Very full bagpipes.”
“It’s the top of a cupcake decorated elaborately.”
“Fiddleheads and an Asian pear on a bed of sunflowers.”
Every answer was delivered as if it were the truth. The drawing became a mirror: people weren’t just seeing graphite on paper, they were seeing themselves.