The beings in these works were encountered in territories I have learned to reach through practiced discipline: lucid dream entered at will, deliberate departure from the body (I cannot tell you what this signifies in any scientific sense; I can tell you what it feels like, which is departure), and states of waking perception that have attended me since before I possessed language to misname them.
These are not metaphors.
I cross with a certainty born of repetition into realms I did not construct and cannot govern. Heavens; hells; vast tracts of unmapped interiority that demanded I name and delineate them myself, for no existing record suffices. The figures I meet there possess substance and volition. They carry cultures whose protocols I cannot parse, languages whose phonemes scrape against cognition without yielding meaning. They conduct their affairs with sovereign indifference to my presence. I am witness, peripheral, often intrusive, occasionally alarming to them. Time in their localities obeys local ordinance: I have departed a realm and returned to find generations collapsed into what felt, on this side, like an afternoon's absence. The encounters jar them as readily as they jar me. We are, at the membrane, mutually uninvited.
What you see below is what survived the transit. Pencil, charcoal, oil: applied with the fidelity the medium tolerates, which is never the fidelity the experience demands. The form translates. The weight resists: what I felt in their presence; what they appeared to feel in mine; the specific gravity of a moment that belongs to neither realm entirely. Where the rendering fails, invention bridges what it can, and I will not feign otherwise. The remainder, the portion that refuses every rendering, is in truth the engine of this entire body of work. It circles perpetually what it cannot contain; the circling is the practice.
I will say this plainly: the work is consequential in ways that extend beyond the canvas. There exist encounters where contact itself proves ruinous; where the membrane between here and there thins past what either side anticipated, and what crosses that boundary travels in both directions. I have learned the caution that attends such crossings the way most learn caution: too late, from specifics I do not discuss publicly, and with a residue that does not fully dissolve.
What follows are responses from people encountering this work, most for the first time. None were solicited for this purpose.
“I’ve never seen anything like this. I find myself aroused and a little frightened at the same time.”
“This depicts a future path of human evolution, biological apotheosis.”
“Your words create a sense of anguished grandeur where every action carries moral weight.”
“I’ve never read a story that so successfully combined scientific futurism with depth psychology and ancient feeling spirituality.”
The disciplines underlying this practice are documented, partially, on The Discipline page. The cosmology these figures inhabit is charted, provisionally, in The Lexicon. The fiction that grants them voice, continuity, and consequence opens to those who cross further in.
What you saw above was rendered by human hands from encounters that were not imagined. If something in the observing unsettled you beyond what the subject matter alone explains, sit with that. The discomfort may be mutual.