Part of an Experiment

The first time I saw a Salvador Dali painting I knew that I wanted to do whatever it was that he was doing. I was 13 years old and my friend, Luke, whom I looked to for guidance on all things cool, showed me a book with Dali’s Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening, which depicts a pomegranate birthing a fish birthing a tiger birthing ANOTHER tiger chasing a gun pointed at a naked chick sleeping. Y’know, normal Monday shit. It was unbelievable to me. Unbelievably cool. It made no sense and yet it made all the sense in the world!

Luke had a whole book of Dali paintings and I was absolutely mesmerized as he let me rummage through its pages. The pictures inside looked real but they were absurdly off kilter. I was looking at page after page of glitches in the matrix and the more I looked at them the more I wanted to see. From that day on, I was a Dali nut.

His paintings and surrealism, the style of painting he excelled at by allowing whimsical, dreamy motifs to take over reality, fueled my curiosity. I have always been pretty weird. My lonely nature was the perfect place for surreal imagery to stew, and before I knew it, I was drawing pictures of apples birthing sharks birthing giraffes chasing naked chicks. Surrealism allowed the non sequitur images of my dreams to fit into any reality I like. It gave me freedom.

Around the same time Luke was expanding my mind to Salvador Dali, I also found myself intoxicated by the Magic Eye series of books depicting stereograms — 2D images that, when stared at for a significant amount of time, present a native 3D image from the same 2D source. I would stare at them for hours, never bored as the pictures within jumped out at me, wanting to be seen.

Finding those two artistic footholds at an early age solidified my tastes to this day. Nowadays, I give elephants fangs, cats Jedi powers and all the ladies get big booties. I play around with dreams and have fun. It’s all just an experiment.

This pretty lady above started as just a simple figure looking at the floor, contemplating. But what if she had a bunch of tentacle appendages hanging off of her? my dreamy self thought. And then, what if these tentacles branched off and enveloped her in this circle of loopy, slimy shapes and then what if it was enraptured by chaotic lines and geometric deluge and yeah sure why not let’s do it.

I like making things that reward a long hard look — things that reveal something new with every viewing. I like making things from the dreamworld — a place where everything is okay, because it’s all part of an experiment.

Sometimes I think my life is just that, part of an experiment to collect strange ideas that may or may not work. For me, that’s certainly what art is: an experimentation of the imagery that occupies my curious mind.

And lots and lots of play.