In search of ways to merge my photos with my art pieces, I thought my series of pen and ink drawings, “Crazy Fish”, would work quite well. I’ve made these drawing for some time. I don’t have any preconceived notions, though the inspiration in the beginning was the incredibly bizarre Angler Fish and equally weird creatures who prowl around at the deepest depths. I always start with drawing an oval for the eye socket and then the emerging optic nerve and go from there. Relying on imagination and intuition.

Like in the series, “Self Portraits on Paper Towels”, I converted photographic self portraits to solid black and white to make them more compatible with the “Crazy Fish” ink drawings. I really like the strong black images juxtaposed the more textural quality of the line work in the drawings. The last step was overprinting a textural layer from photos I had taken over time of various surfaces, like peeling paint, concrete walls, and so on. And viola! Crazy fish were literally emerging from my head.