This painting began when I was peering through the nodes of a budding houseplant at the bruised sunset unfolding outside my window. It evolved over the following weeks into an exploration of visible worlds and underworlds, cities and skies, and the subtle reminders of freedom that emerge when birds fly off telephone wires and plants continue to grow. I finished the painting in the last week of one of the most visionary periods of my life, a set of months when I forgot how to pay bills or do laundry but produced endless works of art that were so much better than anything I'd ever done before that friends didn't recognize them as mine.

The psychiatric establishment calls this period mania. Yet despite the fact that my reality began to spin wildly out of control a few days after I finished this piece, and despite the months of black agitation and unbelievable mood swings when I struggled to put my life back together, I still remember those sleepless, mystical months as a time when the entire universe expanded and revealed its truths to me in astounding clarity. I left lessons for myself that I am still tracing back in time. And I possessed a boundless energy that allowed me to simultaneously immerse myself obsessively in the creation of The Icarus Project, fueled solely by a few grandiose dreams and the conviction that it simply needed to exist.