It has been two years since the completion of this painting but I have to inject that this painting was first a drawing that I completed about ten years prior to the painting. I still have the drawing, I'm not sure where it is, but I have it somewhere.

This painting has a deeper meaning than most. What it is is unclear to me but it was very clear when I created it. I need to show this to my art therapist to help me understand it better.

My symbolism that I use in this work uses some really old icons of the past. The mountains in the background have always been used to express an idea of an inner peace. I believe that to come from my childhood when my grandfather on my fathers side took us up to Saddleback Mountain in California and showed us some property that he and my grandmother owned. I loved it up there and I believe that this was the first time that I realized people owned land. Conceptually, that was a bit beyond me. My father was a pastor before he died and for the first part of my life we lived in houses that belonged to the church. It wasn't until I was a teenager in Minnesota that they bought the house that my mom still lives in.

The walls, of course, represent the defense I put up around myself after realizing that I was much different than those around me and felt was often misunderstood. So Why expose myself? I chose not to. I kept to myself and although I'm not a shy person - by far, I was good at playing the game. My friends' parents always liked me. They're perception of me was of the guy that could persuade their sons and daughters to stay out of trouble, which was rarely the case. My mom always called me a bit of a con artist and probably still thinks that.

If you look at the walls, I included clouds within them and on them. Originally, there were clouds surrounding the walls in part because I didn't want the walls going completely off of the paper. I use a lot of clouds now. They give the harder images a softer feel.

The heart beat is my way of adding a human element to the painting. In the original drawing, I have a fish hook attached to a leather thong with beads hold two feathers to it. At the time, it represented my girlfriend and myself. I didn't include that in this piece because to me it didn't fit in the conceptual ideal I was recreating and that girlfriend is long gone.

It is hard to see the fire that is raging in the background by the green hills, but it is there. This was an added subject to the piece that was not in the drawing. After moving to California and watching the fires on the television and the actual smoke in the distance, I was shocked to find out that this is just a seasonal occurrence and people take it so lightly. I incorporated it into the piece right away.