I come from an Alaskan island named Chirikof -- I wasn't born there and I don't live there, but I owe a lot of my qualities to the time I spent there as a child with only myself and my family. I consider myself an artist, but I've never limited myself to just that. The study of history and language and culture and science and people, and how all of these seemingly-separate areas of thought interrelate is probably what consumes most of my thoughts, and how I can grow as a person and come to understand the world around me with these sorts of ideas. Not everyone gets me, but I figure that is probably a commonality shared by most people.

For now I volunteer at a non-profit art gallery in downtown Ellensburg called Alley Cat Artists. You can find me there just about anytime that we are open, and I help out and hang around at every First Friday Art Walk pretty much every single month. The energy of so many creative people being around at the same time is really incredible, and it isn't at all unusual that I will hang around pretty late in the evening on those nights. When I'm not helping out at the gallery I like to hang out with the talented art crowd we have here, and occasionally I will have an art show, either by myself or as a collaborative endeavor.

Just this January I had a fantastic show with a young, massively talented local artist named Nicole, and the turnout really blew me away!

Haha, I like to think that I do a lot of things well, but my primary skills are in illustration and painting. I have some background in graphic design, and occasionally I write (but I am not as confident about my writing, so very few have seen it. If you ask I suppose I could let you read some of it). While I am no guru, I am very comfortable with computers and the internet -- Except with Photoshop: I AM a guru at that, although I rarely deal with it these days since I don't currently do a lot of image processing or graphic design (maybe the odd gig).

My coat: It is long and black and made of wool with enormous shiny brass buttons. I suppose the other things would be the color of my hair and how animated I am when I get really involved in a conversation (which is pretty often these days).

Books: Genre doesn't particularly matter to me but I am awful picky about the quality of the writing. No Twilight or Dan Brown, thanks!

Music: I am so terrible at music culture that it's mind-boggling. In general I listen to instrumental/non-lyrical/classical, and I am a huge fan of ambient stuff. Typically I just find an internet radio station that I like and play it in the background for the entire day.

Movies: Baraka, The Dark Knight, American Psycho, Thank You For Smoking, Time Bandits (anything Terry Gilliam actually), 2001: A Space Odyssey and so on. Probably later I will add more here. I watch a lot of movies...

I am absolutely addicted to information. I could sit all day at my computer as long as there is internet, but I spend just about 90% of that time researching millions of things.

Art is a really major passion for me, but in order of importance I couldn't say whether it comes first or second on this list.

Walking! Without a car I have to walk everywhere I go, but a walk ALWAYS makes me feel better and now that I have glasses again everything isn't slightly blurry past twelve feet or so.

Well, this makes three things but it would be too easy, I think, just to add some things that I literally could not live without. Maybe I will just namedrop the Sun, Earth, and the Moon for now.

One of my obsessions is to find all the ways that everything relates to everything else. I don't recall specifically why I started researching as a hobby, but after a while I began to realize that as isolated as things can seem from one another, there is this really vast and complex web of interdependence. A lot of the time I am piecing all of those relationships together in my mind, or even trying to find new ways to understand how all that works.
Pretty frequently I will even find metaphorical and metaphysical relationships.

My evenings are often free, so once I leave the gallery on a Friday I pretty much make a beeline for the most interesting-looking things at the moment.

Oh yes, this part I will leave blank for now. I am not so hard a nut to crack in person, though.

Do it. I nearly always reply back. :)