These images absolutely came as a surprise to me. In retrospect, I started looking at images of the Hellenistic reliefs on the Pergamon Altar around 2015 and was immediately drawn in. I explored that subject for about a year, then moved on to other things. The quarreling in these images had been imprinted somehow. I painted for several years but, ultimately, returned to these fighting figures with a new image source — comics — which felt very dualistic yet it was never clear who were the bad guys or good guys in my paintings.

I had some crazy ideas about why I was painting them, but it was always very convoluted and hard to communicate. Using images from classic and obscure comics, I’m afraid it begins to imply that I’m somehow interested in comics or the Hollywood interpretations of them, but I’m really not. They were just a well of images that addressed what initially drew me to the Greek images, almost like a modern mythos that addressed, visually, what the Pergamon Altar addressed. It took me a long time to figure out what the common thread was, though. It eventually occurred to me several years after I began paintings these figures while listening to a podcast about ancient myths — there is this old idea that in ancient times, myth acted as a form of psychology.

If viewed through that lens, there is a very close correlation between my work now and the images of the Olympians fighting with the Giants or the Titans, where the Titans are a manifestation of the primordial self, the self needing to be suppressed, and the Olympians, an expression of the ego, fighting to suppress and ultimately banish the Titans to Tartarus, the deepest, darkest recesses of the earth. I think what is misunderstood in my work is that I’m not trying to paint hip or cool paintings. I’m not cool in that way. I’m painting my interior conflict, where each figure is a sort of expression of my ego or primordial self in perpetual conflict.

Wow, yeah, bringing me back here! I remember playing at the arcade, playing Atari, playing the first Nintendo (NES) and then Super Nintendo. At one point we brought and left a gaming console at my grandparents' house. My siblings, cousins and I would spend hours having single-elimination tournaments on Mortal Kombat. My go-to characters were always Scorpion and Liu Kang. I remember when the N64 came out and how “real” the graphics seemed and the game that changed it all, Goldeneye. It was the first first-person shooter game for me, and I was hooked. I’m a very competitive person, and this game ultimately led to me building gaming computers in high school so I could play Call of Duty and Counter Strike competitively.

I quit gaming in college, but in 2021, I picked up a VR headset to connect and play with a reclusive friend of mine. We’re no longer in touch, but I still play. It’s not enough for me to just play for fun, though — it has to be competitive. The competition gives it a purpose, a goal of some kind. For those interested, I play Population:One!

I had a phase of painting, just before the fighters I’m working on now, where I had envisioned painting this '90s-era game cover art. I can almost see what I was trying to do in looking at Katherine Bernhardt’s most recent beautiful show with the Pokemon cards. But my source imagery with these was very limited, so I didn’t explore it further.

As I said before, I’ve never been really interested in comics, but one day I was in our local used bookstore and I happened to look through the comics. The images I found were very similar to the cover art for the games I was looking at: Double Dragon, Street Fighter, Ninja Gaiden, etc. These comics felt video game-adjacent and I was excited to begin exploring them. I was initially drawn to the idea of nostalgia with the video game and the comic images, but I think, subconsciously, it all tied back to my interest in looking at ancient Greek art and myths.

My most recent fixation has been fungi! I like learning about what is growing in my yard, around my neighborhood and in the woods around where I live. My interest began with mushrooms and has branched out into the vast world of mycology.

We all know that mushrooms can feed you, heal you, hurt you, send you on a trip or even kill you. I’ve tried to identify what I can around where I live because I have small kids, and one of our favorite activities is to hike after it rains and look for mushrooms that have sprung up. It's important to understand that all mushrooms are fungi, but not all fungi are mushrooms.

One of the most important fungal species to humans, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, (more commonly known as baker’s yeast), is responsible for the fermentation process in brewing and baking. I’m bewildered by fungi, and I feel like I could spend a lifetime learning about this stuff and not even scratch the surface.

For example, the tree in my front yard is not doing OK. I can tell that it’s slowly dying from the parasitic relationship between the tree’s roots and the specific mushrooms that are growing nearby. There was a study on slime mold done in the early 2000s that gives us some indication that fungi have their own form of intelligence — solving problems, making decisions, and communicating, despite not having nervous systems.

Every morning is an opportunity to start over. I like to think of everything as cyclical in that there is always the possibility of starting over. It’s easy to get stuck, but I think the best we can do is keep trying and growing and figuring out who we are. It makes me think of the Rilke poem, Widening Circles:

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

A few weeks ago I watched Fitzcarraldo, the 1982 Herzog film, for the first time. First of all, the concept of the film is insane. The main character, who the film is named after, could be described as an evangelist. But instead of colonizing under the helm of Christianity, his pursuit is to give the opera to the indigenous people of the Amazon.

For Fitzcarraldo, the opera is a religious experience. He was moved so deeply by the opera that he is compelled to share this experience. And while I’m not in a place of proselytization, I can understand his madness in relation to painting. I think most artists have this kind of madness in some way: a compulsion to draw attention to a thing followed by the hope that other people will see and experience what they're exalting.