For the Masks & Skulls series, I chose skulls and primitive masks from Africa and Oceana for their powerful symbolic associations of fear and death—what Andre Malraux called "the night side of man"—and subtly shift their meaning by transforming them through my process of coloring and blurring. The resulting abstractions have a nuanced resonance that holds some of the residual dark power of the original object, but they are softened, both literally and figuratively, into something illusory and weightless. It is my hope that this transformation from object to abstraction will strike an unexpected balance between terror and beauty; and in that precarious tension the viewer, caught off guard, will become free to respond emotionally, catching a glimpse into something beyond his/her expectation.