People always ask me where I get the initial ideas for my work.

I get them from the most diverse places:
…A young girl in a sarong crossing the street who I see in a flash out of the corner of my eye becomes a sculpture.

… Or maybe a mother holding a child in a certain way catches me and becomes a painting.

… Or a feeling of loneliness and wanting to fly home produces a horse flying free; a color in a sunrise becomes an abstract – these are some of the ways images come to me.

I’d say that feelings are the source of my image ideas.

Not sentimentality but deeper, more mysterious feelings – more archetypal.

I just finished a painting of a woman riding a strange monstrous-snake thing, into an enormous, inexorable sea of light.

Unbending Intent, perhaps, or She Couldn’t Help It, or To the Light… it will be titled accordingly.

Images like that come from a place I couldn’t identify – I just know it’s there, I go there and “see” the vision, and come back with it. Basic Image Retrieval, I suppose.

Some of my images are not for the faint-of-heart, nor are they the simple-Sunday-afternoon-feel-good kinda look, either.

They tend to whack one a bit, although they are certainly not meant to be evil or malicious – it’s just that I recognized a long time ago that yin and yang can’t live without each other.

If I use, for instance, yin in a painting or a sculpture, without the yang, it will either be sappy nice-nice or destructively violent.

It will carry no “heart juice” – and we all know that for a piece of art to work it’s gotta have heart juice!

I hope that helps you understand a little better where ideas seep out of everyday reality for me to plop onto a canvas or carve out of a hunk of stone!

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