My relationship with the Falling Man image is a serendipitous tale. A couple of years ago I was given one of those Dover clip art books. On a page with a set of dentures, a horseshoe, a skeleton and other miscellanea was the image that I have been referring to as Falling Man. No information about the image was provided. I scanned him into my computer and decided to see where he would take me.

In 2004, while looking for skeletons on Day Of The Dead websites, I noticed that many of the skeletons were by the same person, Jose Guadalupe Posada. I liked his style, so I tracked down and ordered a book of his work.

At the time that I received the Posada book I was working on the painting The First Dream of Falling Man, which was inspired by a dream that I had as a child. In that dream, I vividly remember being trapped in my bunk bed. Beside the bed was a pool filled with sharks that was hidden under an area rug. As I tried to escape, the sharks lunged at my legs. No matter how much I screamed, no one could hear me.

As I looked through the Posada book, to my great surprise, there was the Falling Man image. But even more amazing was the fact that it's original context was an illustration called, Triste Fin De Gerardo Nevraumont, which depicted a man falling off a boat and into the waiting jaws of three sharks.

The individual Falling Man paintings have evolved under brutal circumstances. Some were aborted drawings or paintings that, for various reasons, still held my interest. Others suffered from a sadistic distressing (aging) process that included being soaked in coffee, wine, soil, etc., being abraded with razor blades and/ or power sanders, being left unprotected on the studio floor for weeks, and a few fell victim to atrocities that were simply too brutal or too disgusting for civilized discourse. Paper fears me.

Eventually an image would emerge from this systematic degradation. At that stage I would slow the frequency of the torture and begin to nurture and draw forth the embryonic image. Once the image reached maturity I would glue the paper to a wooden panel to protect it. Then I would carefully and painstakingly polish the image to a jewel- like finish.

Attaching the painting to the panel served two purposes; first, it protected the sometimes- delicate paper from further damage. Second, and more importantly, it allowed me to frame the painting so that the texture and finish of the actual painting were not obscured by glass.

As this series progressed, the frames became an important aspect of the creative process. I had a collection of measuring devices that I had occasionally incorporated into artworks. One day I pulled out a box of rulers and yardsticks and just started cutting them into small pieces and gluing them to a frame in a seemingly random order. This process was spontaneous and intuitive but, in retrospect, I believe that I was grappling with two issues. For the past six years I have been dealing with the institutional assessment and scrutiny that are a stressful but necessary aspect of my profession. If you are going to give a person a job for life, you better make damn sure that they are competent and qualified. But there were many aspects of this process that seemed to be at the whim of administrators who were, seemingly, more concerned with numbers than any personal, social or institutional vision. Second, but more significantly, I was exploring the idea that what we call spirituality or religion is impossible to measure. To put it simply, in a culture that thrives on the scientific, the quantifiable, the profitable, how do we measure the transcendent. The frame is a window to another world and it is a frame of reference.

Because Falling Man has been falling for a couple of years now, I have frequently asked myself when it will stop. I have decided that Falling Man is hoping for an epiphany or looking for an hierophany (an experience where the sacred manifests itself, see Mircea Eliad).

Although I am greatly inspired by such diverse artists as Sidney Goodman, Howard Finster, Leonardo DaVinci, Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Longo, Jim Dine, Frida Kahlo, Mark Ryden, and Robert Williams, one of the greatest influences on my work has been from Pieter Breughel the Elder. In my humble opinion, his stoic observations has been one of the greatest spiritual gifts to the world of art. His paintings of farmers, tax collectors, families, clergy, etc are honest without being sympathetic. They explore moral issues without being overly didactic. He shows a world full of human flaw, corruption and greed. But even in paintings like the Triumph of Death, where at first glance all is lost, there is still hope in a young couple lost in love. Hope, laughter and passion are a balance to a world of chaos, and that is what I seek with my own work.