Christopher Mayo Mayes has a studio near Canyon Lake, Texas where he lives with his piano virtuoso wife, Coco. Artist Statement We are wandering in a fishbowl at the circus of the daft inside the theatre of the absurd at the carnival of souls on the tower of babel inside the garden of eden in the city of dreams in the state of shock on the continental divide with seconds to spare at the last minute at the eleventh hour on fat tuesday during shark week serving 30 days in the hole in a hurricane election year in the decade of the derisive during the century of the cynic in the millennium of the mad in the epoch of the explosive and the eternity of the enigmatic on our way to a mythical afterlife while an amorphous abstraction rumored to be wiser than us decides whether to hit rinse & repeat or just flush as we hang upside down spinning at 1,000 mph as we cover a million miles daily hauling ass around a giant ball of fire. Somewhere along the line, interesting art is bound to be generated. I’m a painter dedicated to capturing energy and exploring subtext, as well as generating symbols. A large core of my work as an artist and lifelong graphic designer has been the creation of a lexicon of iconography built over many years, integrating symbols into work ranging from abstract to narrative. The evolution of this personal graphic language is chronicled in a lifetime of filling up sketchbooks, daily workspaces functioning on multiple levels: idea warehouses for concept schematics, random thought-bombs, abandoned art autopsies, homemade maps used for distilling complexity to clarity (and vice-versa), as well as an outlet for chronic scribbling. Sometimes these homemade maps turn into larger pieces of art, and sometimes they end up on a gallery wall.