Ugly Magic is a book that brings into focus the stuff I manage to eke out when I am exhausted, fucked up, exasperated and my inner critic is getting the best of me. It celebrates about-faces, side quests, cringe worthy moments, aimless play, times of creative gestation when I have nothing in mind and just want to let it all come to me. The title Ugly Magic comes from a sentence in the John Darnielle novel Wolf in White Van. “The world is a place full of ugly magic.”

Started as a daily drawing practice in 2015, I’ve made over 600 drawings and paintings and counting in this vein. Around 300 pieces made over the course of the last 10 years are included in this book. They are grouped, sequenced and separated into sections in a way that made intuitive sense to me as I worked on them on and off for many years. There are threads that weave through all my previous bodies of work to this exhibition’s material. Dark, juvenile humor, the profane, horror film imagery, metal music inspired pictures, the Gothic, the scatological, abstraction, the pitfalls of masculinity, Appalachian pathos, comics, cartoons, death, a certain dare to be stupid attitude, etc.

If I may speak symbolically, I can say that I am using the divinatory instruments of drawing and painting to perform a taciturn seance that casts a visual hex powered by the witch’s cauldron of the self. And Ugly Magic is my Necronomicon.