We live in a troubled world, and I have had a troubled soul. Working on other series of paintings in the past, I usually find a way to grab a toehold of some kind of darkness and push it out to the other side. With this series, I think most of that darkness has taken a hold on me. This reversal isn’t a entirely a bad thing; most of this work I really like. I took a very simple idea, animal forms, and let it take me where it wanted to go, places I hadn‘t been before. All of it was a surprise, especially the sculptural forms. But a lot of this work was born out of anger and anguish and frustration, and I think that’s hard to take in one sitting. These animal forms became 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. The alchemy, the transformation of forms that I look for, happened, but the turn was dark. I chose a deliberate misspelling of the word animal because I think these forms are ideas just beside real animals, closer to human worlds, but not enough to make them lose their animal shapes. 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 we can grow.