I was freelance illustrating from the time I was 17 until, all at once, at the age of 30, I'd had enough of commercial art, and I sat down to do the first painting I'd done for myself after many years of trying to pay the rent with it, and it just came pouring out of me - it had been a traumatic year, and there was a kind of over-wattage - too much emotion to process in any normal way, and I found that the painting could contain all of that. It was very much like dreaming awake, and it gave me an odd perspective about the nasty times I'd just lived through, made me recognize that I didn't have to be trapped by those circumstances. That painting was "Gardening At Night". I painted myself more or less sane, and I've been doing that ever since.
I used to strictly pull inspiration from things that were going on in my own life, or in my own dreams, but I fell in love with the girl in the painting "Paradox", and it totally changed the experience of painting for me, for the better. Ever since then, my inspiration comes from people I admire, or I'm fascinated by - so the paintings end up being about specific things in their lives, and also my feelings about them. I've been meeting a lot of people over the internet for the past six years, and at some point, I got comfortable with the idea of painting them.

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