Hatching

   I can't tell you when it started for sure, but I can say, always, and you'll understand.

   I've always been fascinated by three-dimensional form.

   It's always baffled me, however. It's one of those things that I love, but which has never come easily to me, like music or mathematics. I'm terrified of the consistency of math, how 3x8 is the same as 4x6, both being the same as 2x3x2x2 which is the same as both 3x2x2x2 and 2x2x3x2. The same thing with three-dimensional form: staircases blow my mind; the positive and negative space, the dimensionality of floors of a building.

   I'm in love with architecture, but I'd never be able to go into it. There's something there about the relationship of, "objects in space," that I can't grasp (does that seem right to you?). I suppose that's why it haunts me so much.

   It's one of the themes that keeps on cropping up in my art over and over again, I've noticed. I've never thought to put it into words until right this minute, until right before starting this sentence, but when it comes to my independent art, art not part of any comic books or illustrations but art for art's sake, I'm a surrealist, if it wasn't immediately obvious-- it wasn't to me until just now, yet I've been aping Magritte all these years. So when I say, keeps cropping up: foreground treated as background, positive space treated as negative space. One of my first "cartoons" (in the classical sense) from my mission, if not the very first I think, is of Christ with his crown of thorns, only we see the crown as though a vine hanging underneath an arch that is the shape of the top of his head: it's not a crown at all, but a Vine, the True Vine.

   Masks and faces, that's another major theme. Masks, especially, tying into one of the central themes: the idea of Man as Animal.

   I'm not sure what the above painting, completed today, symbolizes: it's less about Man incubating an inner animal, but about how the animal had always been there, and is now showing through. The Man, in this instance, was the Mask; he'd always been hollow, as thin as eggshell, but it's only now that the shell is cracking. None of us is alone, we're always surrounded by other people, and now the inner nature is poking through for all to see: do they see it? Or do they only see what they've always seen? And how many others share the secret, of being eggshell thin? Is he alone? Or is everyone else secretly an animal too?

   I wish I had more for you than that; that's as much as I've figured out for myself.