A long time ago late one summer day I was walking home along a paved road carved into a hillside when a thought came to me as if from out of the rock that the making of the road had exposed: “All of man’s scientific discoveries and technologies, now and forever, have already been cast into the space between the stars. And from there written into the trees and all the plants, etched into the earth, and all the animals.” It was like saying this knowledge is held within the grace of some ancient, enigmatic sentience. Somehow the message, both strange and beautiful, made perfect sense to me and I just kept on walking.

A few years later in a dream there was a pale blue star that fell from the heavens just before dawn. I hurried down a country road to an open field where the blue star had fallen. The star had broken into tiny specks of ultramarine light scattered in the wild grass. The air in the dream was pleasant and cool in the hour before dawn. As I picked up the glowing specks and cradled them in both my hands a deep loneliness overcame me, like some vast space between the stars. I awoke to the sun shining through the bedroom windows.

In another dream there was a chemistry lab set within a dark, mythic warehouse. There were a few tables and shelves with flasks and beakers. There were bottles filled with reagents, notebooks and other paraphernalia. The warehouse somehow spoke of, well, perhaps a scientific quest now lost in a dark silence. A disenchantment seemed to be settling into my sense of living in this modern age.

These messages and dreams, and the disenchantment with the story of the world around me, became a bedrock upon which I would walk as an artist, though I would not have known it then. And there was one other moment in my life, years later, when I was sitting on a hillside above Boulder, Colorado, gazing east out into the Great Plains. The sun was setting. Lights in distant towns were turning on. All around me there were these specks of light, mostly green, but of every color. As I saw the lights coming on they conveyed a darkness, pools of darkness, like an alien invasion, almost totally foreign to where I sat on the hillside in the midst of all the glittering points of light. In that moment I no longer belonged amongst those lights coming on in the midst of their darkness, as the sun set in the west. None the less, I returned to the lights and the darkness below me, to have a supper and a bed to sleep in. Non the less a part of me stayed on that hillside where the language of my art took root.