My development as a painter is inextricable from my academic journeys in psychology and literature, and my visual art is undoubtedly a result of a fusion of multiple disciplines. The philosophical grounding of my body of abstract painting can be viewed through two complementary lenses: syncretism and liminality. Syncretism, the attempted reconciliation of opposing principles, forms the underlying visual and emotional structure that I create with oil or acrylic paint and other media on canvas. Illusory depth is created in two dimensions using multiple layers and glazes, organic blended colors and forms join linear structures and industrial patterns to form a whole that challenges the viewer's paradigm of opposites within the natural world.  The result of this is that I create in the viewer a microcosm of the way in which I view human existence, a schema in which a rusted piece of metal or decaying rubble is neither more nor less beautiful than a blooming lily; each is transient and spectacular, sensuous and terrifying, removed entirely from the value judgments that society urges us to adopt.

Painting, for me, is a journey into a liminal space. Anthropologist Victor Turner, in his studies on ritual, focused on the liminal space.  He described this as a state of  being "betwixt and between," wherein an individual has begun a journey from one state of being into the next, and can thus claim citizenship in neither while in transition.  Each painting I create is the product of a journey into such liminality, in that I leave behind my ideas and conceptions of good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, engaging instead in the ritual-like dance that is created between my body, my sense of self, my history and surroundings, and the art media themselves. When painting, I surrender to the mystery of the creative process, allowing myself to venture beyond the confines of the conscious mind, into the wilds of what Jung termed the collective unconscious.

In most folklore, and indeed in Jung's writing on archetypes, there exists some version of a trickster figure. Tricksters, by their very nature, challenge us in ways that at times feel playful, at times adversarial, and occasionally outright malevolent.  However, the trickster generally also plays something of a shaman's role, leading one into a state of chaos and liminality so that a necessary lesson may be learned, and the protagonist emerges transformed.  The creative process, in my experience, is this trickster energy working through both my conscious and unconscious minds.  Much like the fickle muse written about for centuries, the creator-trickster enters my dreams and my waking life, hijacking my thoughts, holding a funhouse mirror in front of me, urging me to walk in directions that were previously unthinkable and that are often frightening.

The creative energy that fuels my work is what Jungian scholars term "Eros."  As the son of Chaos and Aphrodite, Eros is not only the sensual and sexual fire that ignites love between humans, but also the churning seat of creativity and inspiration.  Eros is a trickster; unruly and seductive, it plays havoc with our hearts, our souls, our selves.  Yet, without Eros, we are bereft of passion; without chaos, we cannot find rest.  Thus, it is the syncretic blending of these energies that emerges when I paint - Aphrodite and Chaos entwined, the sacred and the profane inseparable, conscious and unconscious indecipherable from one another. Each painting reflects the journey into opposites, a seemingly impossible fusion of polarities, and the eventual emergence of both art and artist, inextricably changed.