They climbed up and up. He opened his eyes, and ventured to look around him. By this time they were already level with the top of the outer rampart of precipices. There now came in sight a wild archipelago of islands, with jagged outlines, emerging from a sea of air. The islands were mountain summits; or, more accurately speaking, the country was a high tableland, fissured everywhere by narrow and apparently bottomless cracks. These cracks were in some cases like canals, in others like lakes, in others merely holes in the ground, closed in all round. The perpendicular sides of the islands—that is, the upper, visible parts of the innumerable cliff faces—were of bare rock, gaudily coloured; but the level surfaces were a tangle of wild plant life. -David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus, 1920

This moment described in David Lindsay's visionary novel A Voyage to Arcturus was the inspiration for one of my earliest paintings, entitled Idawn, which I completed in 1975 at the age of 19. It depicts characters Oceaxe and Maskull riding a flying snake-like creature called a shrowk over the land of Ifdawn. Clearly, there are a lot of bizarre names in Lindsay's book!

Duality is a prevalent theme in my artwork as it is a fascinating mystery of the world in which we live. This symbolic painting was created in 2017 with the core idea being "the union of opposites.” The imagery portrayed is a composite of metaphysical thought from both Eastern Taoism and Western alchemy. The seemingly opposite, yet complementary, masculine and feminine forces are presented as being interconnected and thereby attracted to each other.

My initial inspiration for this painting came from a song, the hauntingly beautiful 1974 piece entitled "Black Flame" by Renaissance. The lyrics, perfectly sung with conviction by Annie Haslam, concerned the inescapable evil within the soul. Visualizing that idea, I imagined a woman entranced by the black flame and holding it near and dear to her heart. I decided to make the design reminiscent of a Byzantine Icon painting, but as a dark counterpart to the sacred. With that image in my mind, I proceeded to bring it into reality.

I painted this imaginative vision as a young man back in 1978. The title One With Nature aptly describes the concept of the piece; however, much more can be said about it. The intent was to portray the natural world through the mind's eye with vivid clarity, reflecting the experience of a meditative, altered state of consciousness. Inspiration for the piece came from some of my interests in fields such as metaphysics, natural science, ecology, and biology. Fortunately, by that time my personal artistic style had developed enough that I could bring such an idea into a painted reality.

This piece from 1989 was my first serious attempt at using pastels. By then, my career as an animator and visual effects artist had taken off; accordingly, there was little time left to pursue my personal passion of painting. I was determined to get a new project going and I began work on Earth Mother using acrylic paints, my usual medium. The painting was well underway when I became dissatisfied with the way it was turning out using acrylics so I decided to completely start over with pastels, an entirely new approach.

The subject matter of my painting, Mysterium, was a major challenge to envision. Creating a portrait of the human psyche, I used symbolic imagery to depict the duality of the mind's conscious and unconscious aspects. Of particular concern was how to best portray the obscure nature of the unconscious. From the painting's first conception, I imagined a mandala, an image based on concentric rings and long associated with the subconscious mind. Ideally, my mandala should be a dazzling sight that would evoke ecstatic, transcendental, and numinous feelings. That goal, of course, would be nearly impossible to achieve. Normally, I do not create "study" paintings; however, to avoid such a task would be to risk ruining a major work. Creating several mandala studies was imperative in order to proceed with confidence in preparing the final painting.