For years, I had been drawing idly, driven by occasional impulse. There was no planning, just a compulsion to put pen to paper and make patterns. If the patterns formed a being or other recognizable shape, it was fortuitous, but not necessarily sought. I would do this and then put the note book away for months, forgetting about drawing entirely.

As time progressed I slowly began to become more captivated by drawing; the intervals between drawings shortened, yet I still didn't study any system of art or plan anything in advance - to do so would have gone against the purpose drawing served for me at the time: unfettered expression, psycho-spiritual effluvia.

I moved to China for work in 2000, primarily interested in writing and languages. My job took up most of my time, but at night I would write in my notebook. Many nights, the process of writing would trail off into cryptic scrawling, patterns, spirals. Under stimulus from the intensity of my new surroundings, I began having dreams of a dark being with patterned body, leaping and dancing with furious, unreal, geometric moves; it was quite graceful, even joyfully daemonic. I associated this daemon with a pair of the similar beings I had hallucinated during a hypnagogic state, years ago, who had danced before me, completely dissolving my consciousness and tearing apart visible reality in swirling tendrils and heaps of black energy.

Unable to forget this image during waking hours, I searched every book store I could find for a representation of it, in order to 'fix' it in my mind. After weeks of poring through random books of art and history (all in Chinese, which made the search especially disorientating), I stepped into a hole-in-the-wall art bookstore on my way home from work, pulled a book from the shelf, and flipping through the pages immediately came to an image of a leaping deity bearing a thunderbolt vajra in its upraised hand with flames and a lotus flower below. I was rivted by it, and knew instantly it was the image I needed.

On a drunken night, wielding a newly acquired rapidograph which I had barely become familiar with, I drew an outline in ink on a blank sheet of bristol, without pencil or preparation, and with just a glance at the image in the book. This began a four month implosion into the world of a 21x29.7cm sheet of bristol, with grudging breaks to leave for work twice a day.

The process was absolutely revelatory. I had never experienced anything like the rapidograph before; it seemed to have no limits in the amount of detail it could deploy. Creating this drawing was something like an explosion of soul. I would just go down into it and get lost. The page, the ink, and the pen tip seemed to become huge, like a vast cavern that I could wander around in freely, watching fat bulbs of ink balloon out and soak into as the hair fine steel tip of the pen cut into the surface of the paper.

This piece really made me realize that I needed to do more drawing...