As an artist, I’m often asked questions I never seem to have a good answer for:
Where do your ideas come from?
How do you choose what to paint?
The truth is, I don’t. They choose me.
Images arrive whole, like visions — fully formed pictures in my mind’s eye. I suppose they’re stitched together from all the things I take in each day, consciously and unconsciously. Like a stew that simmers quietly while I’m busy doing other things.
When these visions come, I’ve learned not to interrogate them too early. I try not to engage the rational mind until I’ve managed to bring something of the image into the world, something strong enough to stand on its own. It’s like waking from a dream — if you start explaining it too soon, you lose it.
Recently, a painter friend told me about painting her mother’s house burning down in the LA fires. She painted the vision before the fire actually came. These witchy moments — these flashes of knowing before knowing — are more common than you might think in the life of an artist.
In 2023, I painted the Whore of Babylon riding the Beast of Insanity. The seven heads of the beast were Trump, Musk, Bezos, Putin, Kanye West, and Alex Jones. I had no way of predicting the headlines of 2025. And yet there they were.
I don’t believe this is magic. I believe it is sensitivity. Attention. Allowing yourself to see not just what is in front of you, but what’s gathering at the edges.
It requires faith. Faith that the inner machinery is working as it should. Faith that the visions are worth following, even if they lead you someplace uncomfortable, or strange, or half-formed. Faith enough to lean into the inner Cassandra — to speak the things you see, even if they make you feel a little crazy. Especially then.
Faith, in this sense, is in service of reason. As a trained biologist, I look for evidence, for patterns, for cause and effect. Like any scientist, I want things to be measurable, explainable and repeatable. And yet, with these artistic visions, the evidence is in the painting itself. I’m sure there’s a rational explanation — some interplay of memory, perception, and intuition — but I don’t have it yet. For now, what matters is trusting that the mechanism works. Faith, here, is simply the willingness to move forward without all the data — a resting place while reason catches up.
Because the real practice is not about certainty. It’s about staying awake.
