These pieces make me smile. They are both very different than anything I've done, and very much alike. They carry a spirit, second to none, and bring me back to Paris, where they were concieved during my visit there for the 2013-14 Dali show at the Pompidou.

This pair of half craniums started long ago as an Homage to Don Miguel Ruiz. In his book "The Four Agreements", Don Miguel, speaks of a night alone in the desert, when and where he looked up at the stars and realized that they were part of him not distant lights as such. I started constructing a sculpture based on a skull where the top of he skull was removable and on a hinge, I filled the inside with plaster and painted the inside as the desert floor and the night sky. I ran into technical difficulties with the project and am awaiting the day when technology will allow me to finish it. The inspiration for these pieces came in Paris, while walking with my wife when I saw some glass domes that had butterflies within them. It was then I knew I wanted to split a skull and paint the insides of the cranium with landscapes. (this is one great reason to love paris, because such things exits in shops, displayed in windows, things of fancy and amazment not found elswhere in the world. (I have even found a Pangolin under glass in a window in Paris...and have never seen one alive or dead elsewhere in the world)

   The "Wet" side of the skull was painted with a seascape, in the daytime with a few clouds and the moon still visable to let its gravitational pull work on the viewer to evoke more and deeper thought. The "Dry" side was painted as a desert landscape with the Milky Way in its full glory to also provoke the viewer into deeper and deeper thought.

   The Nautilus provides for the golden section spiral on both skull halfs, showing both that we are fractal, and that our brains and logic follow lines which are fractal. I actually was going to add a very small model of a fetus at the center of each spiral to designate where memory started, but could not find them. 

  So the feeling I wanted to express in this piece is that the world as you know it, your sensory world, the world you live and breath in, exists within the walls of your cranium, along with all its earthbound thought. But thought, dreams and imagination, have the opportunity to escape that realm and exist outside it. In the two seperate versions of this world outside your head, I chose to represent those thoughts, dreams and imagination with nature itself, and by utilizing a wide variety of species I have demonsrated something I came to realize during this project. 

   That being. "Only thought can be as DIverse as Nature". Anyone with half a mind to understand just how diverse nature is, can understand the power of this realization. Understanding the power of this realizaation alone can bridge new synaptic nuerons, forming new and powerful thought possibilities within your own network. Allowing the fanciful , ever changing creatures of our world take flight in your imagination.

   The Dry: desert night has brought out an amazing array of Moths, Butterflies, Dragonflies, Cicada's, other various flying insects and even a flying lizard to depict the vast array of thought possible in the human mind.

   The WET: Cranium is full of the oceans most fanciful creatures, of all sizes and color, one more beautiful than the next. Nudibranchs (Shell less sea snails) Jellyfish, squid, nautili and fish of all descriptions depict thought here.

  It is this I hope to inspire with these works, new thought, represented in the Wet version of this pair as the swarm of newly hatched deep sea Polywogs on the rear undersize of the cranium, and on the Dry side, the Pupae of the wasp in the same cranial position.

  In the hopes of stimulating new nueron networks in my viewers craniums with this work, I have also attached an amazing video, with all the science and metaphysics behind such an undertaking. Watch it, and it too will expand your neural network, making new connections within your brain, and stimulating your thought, to go new places.