Consciousness, I heard once, is a sprout turning toward the Sun.  
	And I think thatÕs dead wrong.  If the sprout knew it was turning, that would be the consciousness; what we do becomes secondary to the choices made in acknowledgment of our nature.  IÕm always finding out what IÕve already been doing, and I feel like J. Alfred Prufrock when trying to explain why I make work: There is everything, therefore I love this.  
	 I donÕt mean to say that there are no reasons for what I love, but that the reasons could only have fallen into place one way.  From the time the first two electrons bounced off each other, the resulting cascade could only have produced this precise and infinite result, and here we are.  WeÕre made with all our motivations and drives and obsessions inevitably built in, starting other inevitable cascades of creations.  Einstein wrote (misquoting Schopenhauer, damn him for being accidentally ingenious) that we can all do what we want, but we canÕt will what we want.  I canÕt believe in free will either.  I make paintings and sculpture.  But when did I choose to want to?
	I will answer for my work though.  I love it like something small and helpless that needs me, so of course IÕll speak for it.  IÕm just not sure I know it that well yet.
	I donÕt really paint ÔcoolÕ stuff.  I mean, itÕs precious to me, but I donÕt make anything to be beautiful or exotic or exciting.  Ideas start tactilely for me, from shapes formed out of objects native to my thinking.  I work from things that are familiar and quiet: the dirt on the sides of work-trucks, folds in blankets, cups of water.  IÕm looking for this: a way of seeing that is holistic, that does not shut out the unexpectedly ordinary.  I think Nietzsche called it: the sacred has nothing to do with a heavenly realm, itÕs not what weÕre waiting for; itÕs what we have now.  Everyday shit--just normal people and wooden chairs and every fogged-up car window--thatÕs my obsession.  I want to see the sacred.  
	There are so many quiet disasters and sacred oddities, going ignored.  When we sleep, weÕre at the mercy of a terrifying enigma thatÕs considered mundane.  Several of my paintings and sculptures come from this specific wonderful fear.  The figures show up at various stages of immersion and disappearance into a mass of blankets.  Some pieces eliminate the distinction between person and state entirely, and the blanket forms become figurative.  When we sleep, we are alone, or maybe connected to everyone--hard to say which of those is more disturbing.  We donÕt even know what we are because weÕre gone, and we all just go to sleep because weÕre tired.  I paint because thatÕs kind of horrible.  And completely normal.  
	
	I donÕt believe in movie-like happenstances where someone sees some little sketch and discovers childlike wonder in an epiphany.  I think (wishfully) that throwing myself into looking might make it a little easier for others to see the little things, to want to find and understand a little bit more.   Some sort of simultaneous disappearance and coalescence happens every day, Like Frost said, that allows us to remember something we didnÕt know we knew, something that was already in our consciousness, but never drawn out.  It matters to put a kind of a name, in the form of some existence, to those intimate, near-silent shapes.  Everyone has known them already, but we forget things that have no foothold; we need a tether to keep the ideas wherever we saw them.  IÕm doing what I can to seek tethers, then.  
	I guess that makes me, and maybe all artists, fumbling for shadows.  ItÕs hardly ever the case that the lights are on without anyone home, but itÕs more like everyoneÕs home, wandering around, allowing themselves to stumble in the dark of a permanent and deliberate power outage, as a purpose in and of itself.  I think all painters are committing themselves to a lifetime of absurdity--no one is qualified.  But itÕs the only way to find what we didnÕt know to look for.  
	Making anything is an act of skepticism, in the same way that consciousness is.  By definition, representation is critically evaluating what exists in the real world by remaking it.  What makes work worthwhile is this rejection, this finding-of-something.  Tolkein famously wrote that someone breaking something to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.  But if letting things lie is wisdom, I am ruthlessly unwise.  ThatÕs my process by necessity-- irreverent of the materials, the pieces, the justifications, they are all suspect.  I question and destroy my own work and ideas continuously, and itÕs the only way they exist at all.  I canÕt use what I see, or what anyone else has found, until IÕm at a place to deconstruct and rebuild the concepts--not that I refuse on principle or anything noble like that.  I steal shamelessly, but itÕs impossible to use something I havenÕt at least tried to take apart, burn, and resurrect: I donÕt know it.  Making without questioning, using without understanding is the Earth before the Word: empty and void.
 	ItÕs laughable to think that I could change the world with the right painting if I try hard enough, or that I will find myself blessed with a perfect transcendental idea if I do some special thing right.  Everything I can do is all I can do.  I can only use the stupid, happy, dark, conceited, obstinate, beloved things that crawl around the edges of my thinking.  My own ideas and obsessions decide what I make; theyÕre not transcendental.  TheyÕre intimate; they wonÕt impress me (but if IÕm not impressed, who will be?).  Ditch that requirement, of being impressive.  I donÕt make work like IÕm showing the world something wonderful.  ItÕs just mine.  IÕm a normal-people, trying to understand what I see, whether that involves making anything or not.  I donÕt know if itÕs any less valid to watch someone sleep for hours, or to draw their outline over and over in the air with a finger, than to paint them in that time.  It doesnÕt even matter, IÕll have to do it anyway.  I just want to know everything.
	Being a maker for a living (rather than for a life) is a strange paradox.  Is the work socially-relevant enough, interesting enough, beautiful enough, good enough, to justify itself? What is being justified: the use of the materials, the time spent, the space it takes up, its very existence?  The veiled heart of the question truly is money: IÕm supposed to sell someone this mementoÑor, shrapnelÑof my looking.  Somebody asking for a statement wants a good story, and the paradox is, what I keep finding is that the looking is the thing.  IÕm being asked what IÕve found so that someone can obtain a byte of wisdom as Done.  Known.  Conquered--without the looking.  
	My real reasons are disappointingly ordinary.  I need to.  I make work because I canÕt not.  I need it, I need to find what IÕm not seeing, because thereÕs always more.  There is no such thing as Ôarrived,Õ but IÕm going to get as close as I can.  I wonÕt stop working when I know IÕm never there (and if that seems unfulfilling, at least I always have a direction, to just keep looking).  Brett Davis, a contemporary painter, said that great artwork is like a blanket: a sail, a noose, and a burial shroudÑa symbiosis, I thought, where the work takes the maker where it will, uses them up, but maybe sanctifies their existence in the end.   
	I know a story: a man raised by his peopleÕs enemies, placed there with the expectation that he would return as an adult with the information necessary to ensure victory.  In the end, he kills himself, not in order to prevent the information from being used, but to commit his consciousness to the collective, to impart his love, trust, and complete understanding of the ÔenemyÕ to the whole of his own race.  He disperses himself into an ocean of an opposing consciousness.  The drop becomes the sea, and the beauty of his death is that level of his success is irrelevant.  The ideas were dispersed.  
		Trying to see differently, to be looking, is like this: One cup of saltwater in a pool wonÕt make the whole thing salty, but the saltÕs in there somewhere, and every drop in the pool becomes that bit closer to being saltwater.  ThatÕs what IÕm doing.  IÔm trying to get salty enough. 

Edwin Bissel Holt- The Concept of Consciousness
Nietzche- Thus Spoke Zarathustra
T.S.  Eliot- Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock
Brett Davis- Artist Statement, New American Paintings #81
Robert Frost- The Figure a Poem Makes
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine- The story arc for Odo Ital (yes, really) 
Einstein -The Way I See It
The Bible- Genesis 1:2