Mostly I mess around. And make plenty of actual messes in the process. Luckily, something cohesive comes from it, most of the time. The mediums are scattered: paint, ink, watercolor, charcoal, pastel, colored pencil, a lot of magazine clippings and other found images, along with whatever else suits the piece. That’s what I mean when I say, “Mixed Media.” The idea forms as the piece unfolds.

What stays constant isn’t the material, it’s the method. I put unlike things in the same frame to see what they do to each other. A bat means one thing. A bat beside a butterfly means something else. Humans think symbolically, and I like to get in there and poke at it. The medium keeps changing because the idea keeps changing, but the impulse underneath it doesn’t.

It mostly comes back to two things: duality and transformation. Light beside dark, life beside death, with no interest in settling which one wins, because neither can. Change has a cost. It requires coming apart first. Duality is the noun: two things coexisting, unresolved, at the same instant. Transformation is the verb: one becoming the other, over time, through the dark and towards the light.