When I was six years old I discovered how to lucid dream: come to the realization that I am sleeping while dreaming. Since then I began to treat sleeping almost like a job, attempting to discover more and more concepts about dreaming each night, gradually learning how to shape and manipulate my dreams. What I am really intrigued by, night after night, is the incomprehensible amount of detail one's mind can create. Some dreams I will just sit and look at my cracked reflection on a broken window marveling at all the tiny flecks of color and distorted shapes on the various shards, or the dappled light from an autumn forest in the golden hour of the day or the marine projections of underwater shadows forming the most fascinating, beautiful patterns. It is moments like these, when one has those fleeting and aching realizations of how absolutely magnificently beautiful everything is, that we return to our child-like state of utter wonder.

What I find even more captivating is that if one stares at something immensely detailed in a dream, adverts their eyes, and proceeds to look back at the same object, it will appear slightly altered. One’s mind is constantly shifting and creating the scene over and over again, but there is a slight disconnect. This in-between state of just barely grasping is what I attempt to portray through my work: that split second when one become vividly aware; between asleep and awake...the connections but never quite getting there, albeit extremely momentarily. This prospect again becomes apparent when one awakes from dreaming; as hard as they might try, the details start slipping away, like trying to hold water in cupped hands.
This disjunction of memory additionally follows through to our waking life. I think it is intriguing that it is typically the utter extremes that stay with us the most, times that we were horrifically distraught, instances when we were filled with unbounded compassion, with ridiculous awe and wonder; the bare and utter emotions of the human condition. I am most passionate about depicting people, and the concept of memory that goes along with them, the fact that every time an instant goes by it is journalized into our mind. Many moments are quickly forgotten, but some are retained and continue to consume our thoughts on a daily basis. But what are these memories, in a sense? Memories are constantly shifting and filtering into something new; it is altogether impossible to remember every detail of an event that has happened, thus we inevitably fabricate much of what we believe we are remembering. This constant flux of remembering and forgetting, shifting and disorientation is much of where many of my ideas come from within my body of work.