I've never been interested in the kinds of overt symbolism and iconography I see in other pop-surrealist paintings, instead opting for simple and straight forward narratives. I go where my muse takes me: Mouse Trapped is a didactic examination of my own childhood; Mice in the Money and Treasured Moments Before the Flames are blatant celebrations of the Barksian fascination with treasure and wealth; As Time Goes By and Charlie Chicken are odes to a movie a TV show, respectively, that impacted my childhood. Other paintings might invoke Frazetta, Barks, the Brothers Hildebrandt, or Charles Russell.
Barks's death in 2000 had a huge impact on me. I had been working in video games for a decade by then, and had long since left the world of Disney paintings behind. But I never stopped painting. In the early 2000s, when they started auctioning off the Barks estate, I was able to purchase his personal slide collection of his paintings, many preliminary drawings, as well as much of his clipping files (his morgue) and his library of art instruction books. All of this gave me greater insight into Barks as a painter, rekindling my desire to again take up the genre he created.