What is your favorite type of art to create?

Art that embeds reality over time onto a surface. I don’t use paintbrushes — I work with bare hands, direct contact, skin on canvas. The brush lays paint. My hands capture state. Each painting holds the neurochemical signature of the moment it was made, the specific quality of consciousness present when I made it. I paint to see what state my state ignites in another person. Whether what I was feeling when I made it finds its echo in the person standing in front of it.

Where do you find inspiration?

At the edge of chaos and void. The moment where total loss of control and total dissociation are both possible and I grip onto making something to find ground. I find inspiration in neurochemistry — in how different brain states construct entirely different versions of reality. In science. In other people’s experience of consciousness. In pain, in happiness, in the specific quality of attention that arrives when the ordinary architecture of the mind loosens.

What would you do with $25,000?

I’ll fund a salon exhibition of my paintings and the publication of my manuscript. The aim is to reach as many people as possible. This work exposes the hidden inner world of high performers and makes the reality of lived experience mainstream. It challenges the pressure to perform wellness while concealing our actual internal states. Most importantly it makes people feel seen. I was that person. I wrote it for them.