Father and Son: Warm Hugs and Poison Artwork

What if your filthiest, most disturbing, most vicious dreams and desires could come true? You step into a dimension where your suppressed desire of killing off the most hated and dangerous monsters on the world’s stage is acted out; another where you bear witness to an apocalypse-in-progress; yet another where you find your face in a sea of bloody syringes; or where you are forced to reflect on the sex crimes of an unrepentant perpetrator immune from censure or justice. You do not want to watch or acknowledge any of this, but, in a now-fearsome reverie, your body has turned to marble, and you cannot turn away. From within the dark forest, the artist is undertaking target practice on your head, heart and your safe places and cherished convictions. You’ll grope and struggle to discover what—if anything—you can do to avert the world’s slide into catastrophe, or your own descent into despair. Sometime in the second half of the 20th century I was born next to the ocean, in LA, but was raised in the middle of an ocean of corn, in rural, coal-mining, Bible-thumping Central Illinois. This uprooting had significance—first by starting off a search for a place to call "home" (49 attempts); and by launching a violent immune system reaction, severe asthma, where normal activities like a run and romp in Nature were followed up by days in bed gasping for breath. But sickness can create opportunities, and I filled my head with knowledge, devouring all the books—especially encyclopedias—I could get my hands on, and grew a wickedly-vivid imagination. During a 2-week debilitation with measles, in the midst of a fever dream state, my first true brush with art happened: something came flowing out of my fingers onto paper that felt like a world i could step into. I extracted a vision, and made it real. Artists are like professional athletes: unless you’re at the top, your state of being tends toward struggling, poor and loser. Like any other kid with both left- and right-brain skills, I was nudged toward a mix of both, and was lucky enough to fall in love for the first time at the age of 16. My lover was called architecture. That lover is on display here, in my work, and can be thought of as a second marriage, a return, because by the time I finished with 4 years of university studies, the love affair was over—even though I absolutely loved the process of design. I made a diversion to college textbook, medical and encyclopedia illustration.