• As an artist I constantly find myself bombarded with the question: “how can you make this stuff up?” And for the most part I am bothered by this question, for as Julia Cameron once said “art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite – getting something down.” To create a body, to give it flesh and bone and breathe life into its shadowed eyes and form a personality through expression, this cannot be done from nothing. There is no possible way to create such a character from nothing. How arrogant would it be of the artist to think that his almighty pen can stretch into the void and like the magic of the stars illuminate the dark circle with life. It is not possible. Even the imaginary creatures that sometimes spill upon the paper before me do not come from nothing. They come from hard research of the muscular and skeletal structure of various creatures, of studying the sweat on the flank of a horse, of noting the slight flex of the gymnast’s knee. Art is not magic; it does not suddenly appear from out of nowhere. Art must be practiced, studied, and twirled over and over in the mind’s blender, hatched together with a composition, a feel, and colors as well. Art is not an accident; it is all there in the creator’s mind. The artist’s greatest task then is to take what is thought of in the brain and translate the wonderful image to a portrait visible to other’s eyes. In this way art is not the making of things up but of translating a conglomeration of imagery and ideals into one frame of existence.