Artist Statement     I create surreal, contemplative woodblock prints and drawings, rich in detail and compositionally perplexing. I feel the need for a visual coherence between my real life experiences and the realms of my imagination, I take time with each piece so that I can eventually build a framework to connect these two realities.  Overall,  I hope to visualize the relationships between fact and fiction in the world around me.       I plane to complete a large body of work comprised of visual narratives and experiments, which invite the viewer to see through my eyes, while connecting the visual themes and strategies to their own personal experiences. I plan to complete a twenty graphic narratives over the next ten years, each one based on themes from new locations and cultures which I visit.     The importance of traditional relief printmaking in folklore around the world is undeniable, I wish to contribute to ongoing visual history where I live with wood block prints by confronting contemporary issues and actively involving the viewer‘s own grasp of reality. The messages that these stories communicate will be cross-cultural and transcendental of language barriers because they are based almost entirely on visual information. I utilize textures, visual metaphors, and sequential relations to add motion and gravity  to an imaginary world, interweaved with real historical information. Little or no words are necessary.     The lack of text in these books is not meant to create a vacuum of direction for the viewer’s interpretation, but rather to encourage the consideration of visual information as an independent form of knowledge. These sequences stand on their own in verbal quietude while communicating through visual metaphors. It is up to the viewer to read the images and speak for them, to recognize the important differences between each reading experience, and to value the common ideas which may become visible to different people.     During the conception and organization of my imagery, many revisions take place through memorization and reproduction. Distracting information must be consolidated, movements and locations become simplified and made identifiable, and key visual metaphors must be emphasized through compositional tricks. The subjects of my work and the way in which I sequence them into a fluid storyline are refined with each new drawing, done from memory, until they gradually develop into firm strands of thought. These strands are bound to others, making thick fibers of visual metaphors and curiosities which both perplex and inform the viewer.      While viewing my woodcut books, one becomes pulled into an alternate world where monsters, rivers, machines and human communities co-exist. The narratives are put into motion by a combination of accidental and orchestrated events, where each creature plays a certain devious role in altering human history and directing the human imagination of the past, present, and future.