I create art as a form of prayer. That is not a metaphor I reach for to sound poetic. It is a literal description of my process, and I want to describe it plainly, because process is where philosophy either becomes real or stays decorative.
My method begins in stillness. Before an image, there is meditation. I have kept vows of silence as part of my creative practice, and it is in that silence that the images arrive. I call this Anima Mundi, the soul of the world. The images come as though the living world were perceiving itself through my hand. I am not inventing a forest; something is remembering one through me. This sounds mystical, and it is, but it is also methodical. I return to the same threshold of quiet again and again, the way another artist returns to the same north facing window for its light.
From that meditative source, the physical work is slow and deliberate. In Prayer for the Earth, I transcribe a universal prayer for the planet by hand and offer it with the reverence given to something sacred: the prayer is not decorative text, it is an offering, made to last. In Forests of the World, that same devotion turns toward the living forest itself. And in other works it becomes monumental and public: the private prayer made enormous, from Borneo to post wildfire Altadena.
I am often asked how a practice this interior scales to a mural forty feet high or a stage at Carnegie Hall. The answer is that the scale changes but the source does not. Whether the surface is an intimate one or the wall of a sanctuary, the work still begins in silence and still arrives as though the world were looking at itself. The mural is simply a louder prayer.
I share this because I think we’ve been taught that inspiration is a lightning strike: rare, uncontrollable, romantic. My experience is the opposite. Inspiration is a relationship, and like any relationship it responds to devotion, attention, and return. Developing my relationship with the Divine inspires my creativity. Sit in the silence long enough, often enough, and the living world will begin to perceive itself through your hands too.