The Demons Are Angels Too

For a while now there's been one through-line running under everything I paint: I keep taking the frightening things — fear, the unknown, chaos, the stuff most of us look away from — and making them show up in a warmer light. The same face keeps appearing on the canvas. Something that should scare you, a devil, a demon — and it's smiling. Inviting you in.

One day I was looking at one of those paintings and thought: this wants to be a character you could stand in front of. Or hold in your hand.

That's where the totems and talismans come from, and I want to be honest about why, because the reason is bigger than "I felt like sculpting." A lot of artists lose themselves in a single lane. They get so attached to the brushstroke — to their own hand on the canvas — that they forget a composer doesn't play every instrument in the orchestra. He conducts. He holds the whole sound in his head and gets it into the room by other means. I want to scale the thing that happens on the canvas: take the fear out of the frame and give it a body. A life-sized version you walk up to and stand in front of — those are the totems. And a small one you can close your hand around — the talisman. The same fear at the scale of a room, and at the scale of a palm.

The first talisman I made I named Apophis.

Apophis is the serpent the ancient Egyptians used to stand in for chaos itself — the thing that comes in the night to swallow the light. It's also a real asteroid, one that sat for a while on the official list of rocks that might someday hit us. I liked that the name held both, because the fear it carries isn't really mine. It's everyone's, and it's old.

We pass through a stream of space debris twice a year, and some astronomers think the bigger rocks are hiding in it. Look at the moon and you can read how often it gets hit; the Earth gets hit just as often. In 1908, something exploded over Siberia and flattened more than eight hundred square miles of forest — if a city had been standing there, it would have been gone in an instant. None of this is new to us as a species. We just used to keep it in our myths instead of our headlines: the morning star that falls from heaven, the gods who came down burning. There's a reason so many of our festivals for the dead — Halloween, All Hallows, the Day of the Dead — cluster into the same few nights at the end of October and the start of November. The one thing every ancient culture shared was a sky, and on those nights they looked up and watched things fall.

So Apophis is the oldest fear there is — death from above — made small enough to set on a shelf. That's the whole idea of a talisman. You take the thing that's too big to look at, and you give it a body you can hold. Not to defeat it. To live beside it.

Where I want to take this, if I'm dreaming out loud, comes straight from artists like KAWS and Jeff Koons — the way one character can grow into a life-sized sculpture and shrink into a collectible and still be the same character. My foolish dream is a room you walk into where the totems stand six or seven feet tall in polished, reflective metal — so when you come face to face with the demon, you see your own face inside it. The fear, looking back at you, wearing you.

I'll say the commercial part plainly, because hiding it is the dishonest move. Most people can't buy a painting, and they're never going to buy a six-foot sculpture. But they could own a talisman — something the size of the thing on your desk. That isn't a compromise of the idea; it's the point. It means more people get to hold the fear, not just the few who can afford the wall. And yes, I want to make money from it. Artists need to make money — we should be thriving. The people who say a thing like this "holds nothing, it's just a cool object to sell" are usually the ones on the sidelines; it's the oldest dodge there is, going after the artist instead of the work. The maker is in the arena. An object can be a collectible and a talisman at once. I don't accept that those cancel out.

Here's what I actually want it to do — the reason any of it matters.

As I get older and watch people I love die, I keep running into the same tragedy we spend most of our lives hiding from: everyone we know is going to die, and so are we. Left there, it's unbearable. But the longer I lean into painting as a practice — the more I treat this whole strange experience as something with a divinity in it, consciousness first and matter second, not just molecules knocking around — the more that dread turns into something else. Every brushstroke starts to feel like making amends. Like paying back a debt of gratitude for getting to be here at all.

That's what I want the object on your table to do. I want it to remind you that the scary thing was brought to you on purpose — that it came to evolve you, and that turning to face it gives you more faith, not less. The demons are angels too. The shift I keep living, over and over, is the one from this happened to me to this is happening for me. If a talisman can hold that reminder somewhere you'll see it every day, it has done its job.

So say you kept one for twenty years and never read a word about me. What would I hope you'd come to know, just from living beside it?

That the dark side of things is worth your appreciation — that difficulty and tragedy are what bring the color out. Here's a small painter's secret that's really the whole philosophy: some of my favorite blacks aren't black at all. They're mixed from a green and a red. There's an enormous amount of color hiding just under the surface of the dark, alive in there, if you know how to look. I'd want the object to teach you that the way living with it teaches you — quietly, without words. To leave you a little less serious and a lot more curious. Less afraid of being embarrassed. More willing to take the risk and make the move, because somewhere along the way it landed in you that this life is a miracle.

That's why the totem is a mirror. You stand in front of your fear, and what it reflects back — if you let it — is faith.