When I was very young, I recall being in the nature or wild of Anchorage, Alaska, with a reasonable sense of danger from the animals and temperatures that I might encounter, while having a very aware mind to the existence of thought and a sense of a greater spiritual field, or higher power, which I assumed had something to do with my Christian upbringing.  I developed adolescent-onset epilepsy, and this dialog was gone for quite a while.  It wasn't really until I got into the upper division painting classes in undergrad that it returned in my sketchbook, which at first was all over the place but then started circling in on methods, objectives, statements, and eventually on a series of compositions that became the works I produced (with very little face time to contemporary art- in a pre-internet age, mostly informed from looking at the physical slides from my job at the University's slide library either collecting or shelving the slides before or after they were projected or while photographing images from books that were used for the Art History courses.  Coming from Alaska, I felt pretty detached from what I "knew" the rest of the world was from television.  These excursions through the slide files built a sense of history and objects I had never connected to before and began building a perspective of cultures, civilizations, and global dynamics that ran on something other than just the currencies of modern, communist, or capitalist ideologies.  It was also just my side-gig, so I didn't go full nerd and sit around reading about them.  Instead, they percolated with the images I was making in my studios.   I applied to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with these combines of wall sculptures with components painted in oil, with cabinets featuring sculptures that related to the figures' anatomy.  Perhaps a series of entangled ideas pulled out of the drawers from my job, as well as those from past and future perceptions.  The series was dealing with too many topics really, and honestly exposing many places that I needed to improve-- and also featuring an ability to reach from an incomplete skillset through vocabularies blinded by inexperience toward refined, conceptually phrased aesthetic conclusions on the frayed relationships between our bodies, communities, civilizations, and the cycles we repeat by avoiding our difficult problems and falling into variations of the popular tropes and dramas.  My personal battles revolved around value, labor, alcoholism, and creative production.  Other parts of my life seemed to be dealt with very well, but that little function preceding everything else was enough to really fuck up my stride in my thirties while at the same time feeling prepared enough to nurture my talents and engage the art world.  It so happened that with my energy off and my perception twisted, it didn't matter how focused my creative brain was, because my path was suspended in superposition while my body continued to course through truncated waves that cropped the successes I was prepared to engage but did not attract.  Feeling mostly like my path was a collection of false starts and limited energy, I had to take a time out to reassess the spiritual plane I was on.  Having had a child already and living an art life in New York, and not finding a clear political community for my work but having a spiritually compelling resonance to several materials, artists, ad subjects I just continued to refine.  If artists are delusional by default, I believed I had to suppress my conclusional state to understand what the muse was bringing me every day?

As I stretch more deeply into my 40s, I have begun to have a different experience with life.  Both the physical journey and the spiritual one.  First of all, I have developed a way of integrating diverse inspirations that can equivocally interact with spiritual perspectives and scientific logic as a single continuous message brought to us by a higher power across civilizations, times, and personalities that adapt to our preset contextual and intellectual configuration.  Particularly, the discourses of art, architecture, science, technology, and spirituality appear to share a narrative arc that is continually reinterpreted to the individual actors and power structures they are involved.  Each of them, on their own, has methods to divulge information and concretize their statements in their time, which are imperfect to the muse.  The model I grew up with was the Bible, particularly the New and Old Testament revised after the Council of Nicaea.  However, having been on a spiritual journey in life and through my art, I had to remove myself from this edited journey.  First, because I found the cuneiform version of events from four thousand years earlier to be more convincing, but also because, in the separation and similarity of these stories, it poses an interpretive bias of a humanity suspended between the mastery of our seemingly static environment and an evolving cluster of unknowns alongside a human dependence on a spiritual guide that continues to restate itself through human interaction on stones, pages, canvas, and now configurations of objects and even states of material being; though translated through human interpretation, and subsequent interpretations thereof.  To my understanding of popular worldviews, this falls under a monism similar to Spinoza's Monism that proposes a zero separation between consciousness and the cosmos.  We are, in fact, the universe experiencing itself as a single entity, "Sub Specie Aeternitas", however, perspective is specialized to the incorporated matter of your identifiable form.  So there is a separation of forms of consciousness, although we are all connected on every level, mentally, physically, and spiritually.

----

After all that, of course I found myself with the muse again.  One that seemed to have hidden its full intensity from me for most of my life.  I have run through what I have been able to from spiritual philosophies to religions, juxtaposing them against those of the sciences that fascinate me.  The recent histories of information in stones and/or recurrent edits on pages that are obviously cascades of the same information presented to us through our individually coded experience through diverse download styles, from reading visual information to visions and voices that shaped our cultures through events, and left behind cryptic challenges because we are not yet the people we are to become.

So currently I am making paintings about the shape of reality.  The cosmos, how AI is finding genetic variations and proteins that may augment our biological form at the same time that we are proposing to embark on a variety of journeys, from finding life in the solar system to colonizing Mars, and even planning to embark on a long-term extra-system voyage, while having a competing alternative in the AI itself 

Which brings up a philosophical conundrum of post-humanity.  Will we evolve on a trajectory that will destroy our own planet, or can we simultaneously suspend life's advancement on Earth while incubating a variety of specialized versions of ourselves for other environments, either genetically modified or cybernetically engineered, or live under the delusion that there is a perfect Earth2 somewhere that we can ethically send our species to, or, like the Ancient Sumerians' account from around 3500 BCE with a species that had vastly superior technology and ability compared to early humanity, would we engineer life to inhabit spaces that could solve a problem for us.