I'm not a very complicated artist, but I like the darkness that inhabits our world. Sometimes a great strategy for art making is finding a way of grabbing some of that darkness and pushing it out into the road. Occasionally, that darkness turns around and takes me with it. This reversal isn't entirely a bad thing; sometimes pushing a form as far as it will go frays that boundary between ideas and materials until something unique emerges. I like to take very simple ideas, like animal forms or body parts, and let them evolve through many iterations. I am constantly trying to push my work into places I hadn‘t been before, but I'm not heroic, even if my vanity would like to think so. This art stuff hasn't always been a successful enterprise for me. There is an inherent contradiction between the daily practice of making art and the desire to bring forth something new. The sheer repetitiveness of it can close a lot of possibilities. If you pay attention, you can see that a lot of my work is born out of anger and anguish and frustration, and I think that’s hard to take in one sitting. People lie and hide things inside. I am a terrible liar, but art is the best lie that I've been able to work with. That’s the mystery and fun of people. By playing with lies, my forms become surrogates and midwives to a whole array of dark impulses and desires, impulses that I see take shape in the world and pass on because they are ignored or unobserved or passively accepted as the usual state of affairs. And so I can take some of these fleeting instances of personal interaction and create icons of form and feeling, using a stained glass needle for sewing up souls, poetically speaking. Transformation is the underlying current for most of what I do in my work. It is important to remember that darkness isn’t the same thing as negativity or pessimism. Sometimes shadows hide much that is worthwhile to examine, if only so one can grow. That's a whole lot of fancy talk for saying that I just want to make art.