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Art student Alexandra V. asks: "What does your work aim to say? (About the world or your life)"

Alexandra, when you ask about what my work aims to say, it sounds like you're wondering about the intended meaning of my work: what I'm after when I do it, or what I hope to express or communicate.

Let's start by distinguishing those two ideas. As I understand it, expression has to do with how art can translate a feeling or an idea into tangible form. Communication, by contrast, is concerned not only with the revealed thought, but also with what the viewer actually takes away from it. Expression can happen without publication or sharing, but communication requires another person to engage with it.

It's hard for me to explain what I hope that my art will express about my life or the world around me, much less what I expect people to take away from it. Here's why:

1. Each painting has a different motive. Sometimes I'm inspired by the delight of a spring day; sometimes it's the morbid glee of a devastating caricature, and sometimes it's the sadness of an abandoned building.

2. What a painting has to say isn't readily translatable into words. Painting and writing are such different modes of thought.

3. A lot of my paintings are about the thrill of creating a realistic illusion. I never tire of the pleasure of translating something fleeting or unloved into permanent form. It's like preserving a flower in clear resin.

4. I'm often interested in finding exotic beauty in commonplace scenes—or finding commonplace beauty in exotic fantastic worlds. Those two goals are related somehow. That explains how plein-air paintings of gumball machines were painted by the same person who created Dinotopia. 

5. If I've learned one thing from social media, it's that I can strongly influence the way people respond to an image by how I choose to present it. People react not only to the image, but also to the title and the caption, and you can measure that response in the analytics and the comments. If a picture appears in a video, it's influenced by what comes before or after, and also by the voiceover, the music, and the sound effects. If a painting appears in a museum exhibit, a person's reaction is shaped by the frame and the title card. It's impossible to present an image without some context, and context is everything.

6. Even though I write a lot about my art, and I'm conscious of what goes into it, the meaning of it is somewhat of a mystery to me. So I'll leave it to others to interpret what my work is about. Art critics and academics have no problem doing that. One time my son was taking a class in fantasy literature at an Ivy League college, and he told me they were reading and analyzing Dinotopia as one of the texts. I offered to come and explain why and how I created the book, or at least to discuss it and answer questions, but the professor said he didn't need to hear from me. From his perspective, what I intended didn't matter as much as what he had already concluded on his own.