Abyss Node 12 04 25 | Childhood Visions

Artist Statement

Childhood Visions

My earliest encounters with art were portals.

As a child, I would sit with the album covers of early-70s rock records, Elton John’s Brown Dirt Cowboy among them, and fall into their strange, other-worldly landscapes. These covers were more than design; they were invitations. Painted gateways that opened into dimensions filled with surreal creatures and mythical forms. They were just large enough to feel immersive, just mysterious enough to feel infinite, and they became my first lessons in the power of visual art to transport the mind.

As I grew, the doorways expanded. My first real love was Dalí. Visiting his museum in Spain at a young age cracked my imagination wide open. And in those pre-internet days, the impact of such an experience was amplified. Art, like music, was precious, something we approached with reverence. When a new album came out, we listened to it straight through. We didn’t skip. We didn’t swipe. We devoted ourselves to the encounter. The experience was a ritual.

Today, in a world where endless content lives in the pocket, the bridge between matter and soul has thinned. We possess technological power that would have been mythic a century ago, and yet the inner life of the human being grows more fragile. Mental wellbeing is deteriorating even as convenience expands. Medication becomes a patch for the soul, not a cure. Presence dissolves in the tide of distraction.

This is why I return, again and again, to the origins of my own creative spark.

The work I make is a reclamation of that first doorway. An attempt to rebuild the portals that once carried me from the ordinary into the vast inner landscape of wonder, freedom, and awakening. My art is a trail of breadcrumbs for the collective psyche, a series of visual passages designed to guide the viewer from the mundane into the mythic, from the hardened mind into the inspired heart.

The textures, shapes, and beings that appear in my work emerge from a place where the ancient past and the unborn future converge. They carry the shamanic impulse, to break apart the calcified, to let the waters move again, to re-activate the life force that becomes dormant in a distracted world. These forms are not merely images; they are catalysts. Invitations to dissolve, rediscover, and remember.

Ultimately, the path always leads back to the same truth: love.

The essential myth of every age.

My intention is to create art that softens the petrified mind, that reopens the heart, that reawakens the presence we have forgotten. To offer the viewer a moment of surrender, a return to seeing with the innocence of a child. When we give our attention fully, when we release the noise and show up with presence, the artwork becomes a living encounter.

This is the alchemy of the work:

darkness into light, fear into freedom, poison into medicine, matter into soul.

A reminder that presence is life, awake, alive, now.