My paintings are conversations in symbols that take place between the conscious and subconscious levels of our spiritual nature. My work seldom represents a specific time or place, nor is it chiefly narrative. Often, I can offer no clues to explain the symbols and images that appear. They flow from the subconscious stream that runs through the heart. There, I look for a seed or gene that carries a pure, original idea for a picture. Sometimes I find it in dreams, but more often in contemplation of moments from everyday life. Once realized in my work, the result often comes to express a deep meditative silence.

I am interested in communication between different forms, beings and lives through the lingua franca of the mind. The characters in my work - wolves, birds, snakes, flowers, rocks, people - all exist as symbols of the undercurrents, the hidden forces, the unseen hands, what some call the subconscious or metaphysical. To me, all observable phenomena are simply different visible forms of the same substance, transfigurations of the invisible but universal life force that we might call "spirit." Through depiction and observation of the tangible seen, I try to prove the existence of the spiritual unseen. The seen is important both for that which it displays and for that at which it hints; our observance of something can incite a longing for spiritual truth. However, the key issue is that such truth cannot be depicted objectively, but can only be grasped via direct individual insight. My paintings therefore try to provide the conditions for such insight to take place.

The characters that appear in my paintings don't simply stand alone, devoid of their real-life significance to us. Instead, they come alive and are complete beings, vibrant with the symbolic meanings that they carry and that we attach to them. I attempt to use each image so that the relationship between its formal and symbolic parts is forever complementary. When successful, a spiritual resonance between these parts is established through which the images, individually and collectively, reveal their inherent dynamism in a way that can be both particular and universal. This dynamism is the life force; the piece gives a whiff of higher truth, pointing us inward toward the spiritual source, priming our minds to make the jump to deeper understanding.

June 1998