How I Learned to Trust the Symbols in My Art
For much of my early adulthood, I struggled to explain where the images in my art were coming from.
There were strong visual influences from comic books and metal album covers – that part was clear – but from the inside, the actual creative process was mysterious to me. I would sit down, begin drawing, and images would spill onto the page with minimal intervention on my part.
In art school, my professors pushed me to be specific about how I was choosing each object and figure, believing I was making deliberate choices. But hard as I tried, I couldn't offer a meaningful answer. The reason was that I wasn't actually choosing anything.
Over the past five years of creating my dark surrealist work and writing about it on this site, I've learned that the imagery in my work isn't random – it's a manifestation of my unconscious mind transforming thoughts and experiences into a surreal, heavily symbolic visual language.
I'm not unique in this. I've heard a variety of musicians, artists, and creators describe the experience of channeling their work instead of creating it themselves. With my own art, I believe it's close to what Carl Jung described as active imagination: waking awareness connecting with deep-seated emotional material to produce figures and scenes.
My early lack of awareness around my own process created a disconnect between the emotions behind a piece and how the symbols appeared on the page, causing the visual influences to dominate the underlying expression.
But over time, I've learned to trust the signal.
Four years ago, I remember working on Pillars of Affliction and believing I was just making a "cool" image. But as I got curious about it afterward, I was able to match specific aspects of it to things I was living through, specifically the physical pain and uncertainty of a series of reconstructive jaw surgeries.
By tuning into each piece in this way, my clarity about a piece incrementally moved forward in the process. Eventually, I had a strong understanding of the inspiration while I was still roughing out the composition.
Moments After the End and Tension and Reverie marked this transition for me. Even though the specific symbols still required detective work during and after their creation, I remember having a clear idea of the emotional underpinnings of those pieces before I sat down to begin drawing.
The progression of clarity and understanding of my own work was catalyzed by a personal transformation last winter that cleared away layers of persistent anxiety and self-criticism, allowing me to gain a much clearer sense of who I am as a person – and by extension, who I am as an artist.
Now, my process for a new piece no longer begins on the page – it begins with recognition of the emotions and experiences that want to come through the art. When I relax and allow myself to tune into those feelings, an image appears in my mind, typically almost fully formed.
With little ambiguity left about the source of the image, the challenge has become about expanding and clarifying the symbols while I draw. I believe my work as the creator is to listen and let these symbols tell me how they want to appear.
This has led to a visual style that more directly communicates the conceptual layers of the work, something I shared details about with the finished drawing for Legacy Code.
For the first time, I feel fully aligned with the art I'm making.
My early understanding of my art wasn't wrong: the visual influences from metal music and comic books were real, and they provided a valuable visual framework for my expression at the time. But the heart of the work was always in the emotional texture of my life experiences.
I simply needed to learn how to trust the signal.
I post process videos, sketches, and behind-the-scenes work as new art takes shape. If you'd like to see the next stages of this world as it's built, you can find me here:
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