The Creatures live in a simple world of abundance with no explicit hierarchy.  A lingering eclipse of the sun saps the health of a fruit tree, which sheds its leaves onto a sliced bun that a Creature left cooling outside.   Another Creature delightedly eats the bun with sandwiched leaves.  The hamburger is born. While digging space for a hamburger factory the Creatures unearth a cavern of eagerly obedient pink cookie elephants.  The pink cookie elephant becomes the first domesticated animal, put to work in the hamburger factory, and streak spirits become the second.  Creatures ride them through the subterranean caverns while the lobsters look on. The Creatures uncover a panel that reads “Never Judge a Mango by its Color," an aphorism of such gravity they post the sign on a hillside and gather to ponder it.  The sky-fish float in to observe. Breaking earth on another factory, Creatures slice into an untouched mountain and its innards ooze out.  The Creatures see this and are overwhelmed with remorse.  The mountainside blasts into the air, remaining afloat.  Spirits of the deceased extinguish the fires with rain. On a mountaintop a Creature sits in the rain and inflates a balloon.  It engulfs the world as far as he can see, which he thinks is pretty darn great. Pink cookie elephants; a piece of glow-in-the-dark jack-o-lantern confetti; a tiny, translucent, rubbery lobster; “Never Judge a Mango by Its Color;” a tiny, military ration Tabasco bottle.  These are objects, ideas and impressions that struck me once as special.  They are aboriginal deities, like skeletons with fish for heads; my lemon tree that must survive and be pretty and make me lemons in my cold Utah bedroom (I still sit in the glow of its lights at night when I should be sleeping and stare at it); clear things—oh so many clear things.  Often they are of little value to most people, but I feel compelled to celebrate them. When I was little I passionately, protectively saved meaningful material objects.  To lose a broken quarter machine toy that my dad found on the pavement was like losing a family member, and that family member was murdered and nobody gave him a funeral.  I saved drawings I made on little slips of paper, a stick that looked like an alligator, empty tape canisters, and wrappers.  I fought change of beloved things.  One night as a nearly-11-year-old I tried to sabotage the cementing of our red ant-infested backyard dirt road because of “the memories attached to it.”  Strange things are precious to me. To celebrate these things and thoughts that move me I give them homes in my paintings.  There they form worlds with histories and futures.  The formation of those worlds determines a narrative, which necessitates addition of other objects and materials. The power to see what is normally concealed delights me and manifests in my art as cross-sectioning the earth like a sliced calzone (Have you ever seen photos of sliced calzones?  They’re beautiful.), and in the use of translucent materials.  I deeply admire the practice of grasping every aspect of an experience, wasting nothing, and it’s what compels me to elevate little, precious things to places of consequence. What better example of a thorough experience than food in its many forms, dramatically stimulating every sense?  Food entered my paintings as geological strata but returned because it’s glossy, oily, brittle, pillowy, oozing, moldy, all-colorful, and exists in every taste and fragrance.  It is something that people regularly experience in its completeness.  Food, along with other objects and thoughts that form the paintings, is evidence of uninhibited awareness in experiencing life, considering it in all its intricacies and potential.  The events in the Creatures’ lives represent the collective significance of the objects: that there is value in experiencing life with considered alertness.