People often tell me that my work depicts the imaginary. I guess what they mean is that I don’t paint the real world – you know, still-lifes, landscapes, portraits. But I don't see it that way. The world is insane. Insane and horrific. And undeniably beautiful.

All of my work deals with this truth. I don’t replicate the mundane because for me, the mundane is the fiction. The fruit in that bowl – it was born in the decaying flesh of a thousand creatures that once clung desperately to life. And even now, the fruit plays host to a horde of maggots, writhing just beneath the surface. To p...

People often tell me that my work depicts the imaginary. I guess what they mean is that I don’t paint the real world – you know, still-lifes, landscapes, portraits. But I don't see it that way. The world is insane. Insane and horrific. And undeniably beautiful.

All of my work deals with this truth. I don’t replicate the mundane because for me, the mundane is the fiction. The fruit in that bowl – it was born in the decaying flesh of a thousand creatures that once clung desperately to life. And even now, the fruit plays host to a horde of maggots, writhing just beneath the surface. To paint it any other way is to tell a lie.

That landscape – it was forged of the cast off detritus of a billion dying stars, forged through mind numbingly complex geological processes that spanned eons. That rock in the foreground, the one casting the pleasing shadow upon the grass, it was once part of a great ridge bisecting the continent of Pangaea, a ridge in whose shadow behemoths prowled some two hundred million years before man took his first clumsy step.

And that portrait – just thirty layers of dead skin encasing an organism created through an imperfect reproductive process resulting in no fewer than sixty unexpected mutations, any of which might result in horrific disfigurement, or abilities that far surpass anything that could be called human. Does the portrait capture the being's fathomless ability for kindness? Or cruelty?

This is what I paint. This is why I paint.