Religion scholar, Karen Armstrong, emphasizes two essential ways of thinking and aquiring knowledge: mythos and logos. Mythos engages symbols, rituals (and the arts) to understand the inexplicable and unknowable; death, God, loss, the meaning of life, . Logos makes use of that which can be known through the senses or by reasoning, in other words, scientific, rational thought. According to Armstrong, these ways of knowing have historically been equally important, but remained operable in distinct and separate spheres of life. While mythos has been considered indispensable by most cultures, it's use has been restricted -- as has logos. Most cultures have known well enough that employing myth and prophecy to arrive at pragmatic decisions concerning daily life could be disastrous; and that reason has rarely assuaged the pain of loss or the inevitability of death. Armstrong observes that in our Modern era, some have tried to utilize only one way of knowing exclusively, "...an increasing number of people regard scientific rationalism alone as true, they have often tried to turn the mythos of their faith into logos." Likewise, some people have tried to rely exclusively on mythos as the only way of discerning truth.

These works revolve around the possibilities and dilemmas of understanding scripture, myth, and ritual in purely rational ways. Some of the works portray penitents fruitlessly, rationally engaged in a symbolic practice they don't understand as metaphor. Other images consider alternative ways of interpretting scriptural texts or rituals. Referencing panel paintings of the northern renaissance, which dealt primarliy in portraiture and religious narratives, I use this style to address alternative interpretations of standard, ancient religious stories.

I often select subjects that have been represented in a standard way for hundreds of years. For instance, in The Original Sin, I depict the temptation of Eve with an apple -- an image recreated in the same way for millenia. Even contemporary artists tend to depict this story as it has been represented for centuries. But if one takes the fundamental elements: nude female and apple, and shifts the context a little, the narrative takes on a dramatic reinterpretation.