This is Chapter 3, and if you’ll notice that there are three lizards in Chapter 3.  And when I was a young kid, all of our family lived in Central America, and specifically in Guatemala-- Guatemala City.  And I would go to the market with my grandmother to translate for her.  And one of my first visual images that I can recall was iguanas tied by their tails hanging from the ceiling.  Some of them were dead and some of them were alive.  And that image, that visual image of those lizards has stayed with me my entire career, and I’ve used it multiple times and in numerous drawings and in other chapters even in this body of work.

Chapter 4 deals with a lot of portraiture and a lot of science.  So I have family members, friends, and the artists all at the top of this chapter.  These artists are people I would like to know, I would like to have a conversation with, and have dinner with.  There is Dell'Acqua on the left, and next to Dell'Acqua is Dell’Acqua again.  And then we have Coleridge, Pontormo, Velázquez, Toulouse-Lautrec, Raphael, Susan Rothenberg.  And then on the second row, going from left to right, the artist Caravaggio, van Gogh with Frangelico looking over his shoulder, then Degas, then Brunelleschi, then Raphael again, then Bruce Nauman, then a contemporary musician Pascal Dusavan.  And then everything starts to proceed into science.  You’ll notice, it looks like a hurricane, but I prefer to call it a singularity.  And we have this nude female figure that’s either coming out or being sucked into this vortex.  And I think it’s important that the viewer have their own interpretation of that.

Chapter 5 I believe is the most different of all of the chapters in the entire exhibition, because there’s a very extreme, at least for me, use of color in that red.  And there a lot of abstract drawings.  And I’ve never really made drawings that didn’t have subject matter.  So for me, this is a real departure, and one of those welcoming departures, that I hope maybe in the future might even take me in different places.  And that was one of the whole reasons I did this entire project.  I didn’t want to rely on what was comfortable.  I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and explore different areas, and this happens to be one of them.

I think Chapter 6 really does follow some of the parameters that I set down when I began the entire project.  A few of those parameters were: it would be a drawing media, each piece of paper would be the same size 19” x 24”, I wouldn’t edit, I wouldn’t go back and redraw, and that I would try to focus on the stream of consciousness.  And you can see there are leftover thoughts of abstraction from Chapter 5.  But then those are placed next to a very obvious image of say, a shoe, or a glove, or something like that.

7 you see self-portraits, but it’s an evolution in reverse.  We always think of things in the normal evolutionary cycle of birth to life to death.  Well I think the arrow of time could be reversed so that you would think of death, life, and birth.  So the first self-portrait you see is of me of this age right now.  And then it goes in reverse to where it goes all the way back to a child in the womb and even sperm.  If you look towards the uppermost left corner you’ll see there’s 1-2-3-4-5 design elements.  But then those particular designs superimpose themselves over airplanes in drawing number 6 and 7.  Then those airplanes turn into flying bugs and then it continues to evolve.  And there’s a lot of visual evolutionary aspects to the entire project.

So this particular chapter, I wanted to do something with music.  Because I love music.  I listen to music in the studio all day when I’m working.  One of the parameters was I did all the drawings consecutively, so I start in the upper-left and then work my way across just like you’re reading.  I wanted it to be a stream of consciousness.  I wanted it to evolve.  For instance when I was doing the harp on the left, it was too static for me and too mechanical in the sense of man-made.  So I thought, “Well what can I do to that image to give it a little bit more life, a little bit more energy?”  And I thought, “Well, I’ll put a tail on it.”  This engages you more because it’s unexpected for one thing.  The second thing is you’re combining a musical hand-made instrument with something that is alive and organic.  So you put those two together and you get another sensibility.

This is actually my brain.  So I went and had an MRI, and from that MRI, I did these drawings.  In this particular drawing of the brain, I wanted it to be literal.  And I actually drew the side and the top view as accurately as I could.  It’s not an interpretation.  The doctor that did the MRI for this, he came over to the studio and he was looking at it, and he said, “Well that last area of the drawing, brain tissue when it’s magnified, looks exactly like that.”  And of course I said, “Perfect.”  I believe the last portion of this chapter on the right has the sensibility of water and brain tissue, and I like that you’re not quite sure which one it is.