These paintings attempt to disobey a world that demands concrete decisions, a world that requires us to eat all meat or none at all or to be entirely for a war or entirely against it. The masked creatures exist in a familiar place, where fiction and nonfiction are one in the same and where emotional closure is always just one step away.   The characters are bruised, sore, bony, and contorted, but they are not victims.  Their world is just more sophisticated than our own; a world where contradictions can coexist, where intimacy is not linked to fear, where humility often looks like integrity, and where everyone knows that taking a deep breath in requires the very act of pushing it back out.