This was an exciting time for me and the entire episode is something I hope never to forget. There is a single moment, however, that enjoys a place of solemn honor in the halls of my memory: seeing Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” with my own eyes.

It was October. We went sight-seeing. We did many things, and one of them was a handful of museums. None of the others knew much about visual art, being focused more on music, either being in bands or radio. I, however, had been studying painting for the bulk of the prior decade.

The MOMA was fairly empty, so the three of us wandered lazily through the galleries. Here and there were canvases I knew, sprinkled among works unknown. I passed these famous works, entirely non-plussed at their presence in the halls. I had studied these works for years and yet none of them held weight to me. I was disappointed at this.

I remember: someone was gawping at a Mapplethorpe print and I moved on. The next moment I was face to face with one of my favorite works of all time. Dumbstruck.

There it hang, sans pomposity, on a wall within New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

I could have reached out and touched it. Ran my fingers over the texture of the paint, made my mark upon the frame.

The perverse imp chained in my brain thought about doing so. Luckily, the idea of such a vulgar sacrilege shivered my soul and stayed my hand.

I stared at the painting for several minutes as whirls of understanding unlocked in my skull. It is a far different thing to see van Gogh’s work as textbook photograph or a low-resolution jpeg and admire its beauty than to stand before its feverish radiance.

Much of the lighter “paint” in the work isn’t paint at all. Rather, it is the yellowing canvas that peeks through the oils. Van Gogh just. . . didn’t paint there. This is something that they don’t teach you in school: that one of the most talented, innovative painters in all of history was sloppy.

I can see a manic van Gogh violently scraping the color in circles with a palette knife, the furious specter of his insanity serving as midwife to the brilliance. There is a dread music echoing through his skull, a relentless tune driving him ever forward to communicate in a language understood by no-one.

My eyes crawled over the dried texture of the oil, reading it as sheet music. I could feel the symphony within me, faintly building in volume, my pulse a staccato drum-beat. This was the Rosetta Stone to a different language, one that would push and push and push through the frail membrane of my sanity.

A glorious, fragile epiphany.

Behind me: a faint cough that shattered my reverie. I immediately cast around for one of my friends with whom I could share this experience.

“Dude! Dude! Come here! Dude, you have to see this!”

He shambled over. “What is it?”

“Dude. This is one of the most important paintings in the world. It’s one of my favorites,” I gushed.

He had the grace to look at it for a few moments before saying “huh” and wandering off, exactly as non-plussed as I was before.

I, however, was a changed person.

Jenny takes words and makes them into art. This sounds very much like “poetry” – and, in fact, much of her work is collected into volumes that resemble little black books with poems in them – but the initial executions create what can only be described as an experience.

For example, her work Laments is a series of “poems” – but they are chisled onto stone sarcophagi. The same words are scrolled across LED light displays – which provide the only light in the exhibit.

She purchases billboard spaces in major cities to present a single phrase from time to time (called Truisms). The poetry of the words and the context they are displayed form the basis of her art.

It’s plain brilliant.

She has a twitter account, and her postings there are good examples of the Truisms:

RELIGION CAUSES AS MANY PROBLEMS AS IT SOLVES

POTENTIAL COUNTS FOR NOTHING UNTIL IT’S REALIZED

GUILT AND SELF-LACERATION ARE INDULGENCES

Her work has affected my own meager pushings with a profound power unmatched by any other visual artist. Looking backwards, I can say with assuredness that I would be a completely different person today had I not been introduced to her art.

When I discovered her work (in or around 1993), I started thinking about the metaphysics of symbology. One of the things I was struggling with was simplicity. I was trying to create an emotion in the viewer of my paintings and prints something direct – something more controlled. I wanted to set people up and then punch them in just the right way so that they would think or feel exactly what I wanted them to.

My first attempt at this was a violent-looking, multi-colored print. I wanted to express a seething, bubbling anger, and once the first prints came off the line I realized that it wasn’t working exactly how I wanted it to. So I made a second plate and struck it below the first one. This plate was a word, deeply scratched, very angry:

MOTHERFUCKER.

It did exactly what I wanted it to do. The print seethed on the wall. It was selected for a gallery show . . . and then promptly pulled from the wall after a complaint.

The next work I did was a stylized gesture drawing of Jesus Christ on a crucifix. It was done with very thick, very bold lines. Underneath, in block letters, said the following:

COMMUNIST

This, too, was deemed too controversial for show in the two-star West Virginian town I lived.

My next few pieces were less hostile to the viewer:

After this, I began thinking very deeply about language, metaphor, and the metaphysics thereof. So much so that I switched majors from art to philosophy – specifically so that I could learn the deep magicks of words. I needed to understand what exactly happens with this thing called “language.”

Why, exactly, is it not a pipe?

When the digital age began waxing in earnest, I began exploring the nascent technology of hypertext as a medium. How brilliant was it that I could change the context of a word simply by “linking” it to another topic? I didn’t have a Mac, so I wasn’t able to create hypercard stacks; instead I found a compiler for Windows 3.1 help texts, which were also hypertext documents.

These were protoplasmic, experimental things, but in creating them I began to understand the how people viewed words and their contexts.

The word “Blood” means different things to different people. For children, it equates to pain. Women are far more used to blood than men. Surgeons more so. Soldiers look at blood with different eyes than me. And so forth.

Then came the world wide web, which opened a new playground to me. I made some more experiments, but the technology in the early years (1994 through 1996) was either too cumbersome for viewers to be expected to have or too obtuse to work in. But in 1997, the language of javascript reached a level maturity where it would do what I wanted and I created my first “digital experience” that I felt worth viewing: a b y s s.

a b y s s was a difficult thing for me to build for many reasons. I was part of a new movement in art and the tools to do these things did not exist: we made them up as we went along. But mostly, the subject matter was difficult for me to write about.

a b y s s was a series of images, words, and animations linked together to form a cohesive experience. The choices for images, words, and animations were designed to push the viewer’s mental space into the area I wanted them to be in through a series of shared psychological associations (for the first three parts) and then in the final part I layed down the sucker punch: I was able to say exactly what I wanted to say and have it be understood within the specific context I wanted.

It was an extremely well received work. It won a lot of stupid awards when everyone was giving awards out for stuff, and earned me a spot in the hell dot com collective (a group of digital art people who were like me).

I had another work planned called shard but it was never finished. Other things got in the way: work, life, love, what-have-you. I began writing more, and the writing was less time consuming. This, too, was well received, but it has never scratched the itch that Ms. Holzer first gave to me.

The other night I was speaking with a photographer I met, and I mentioned Jenny Holzer to her as one of my influences. I like this person’s photographs – a lot – and this reminded me of an idea I had that hearkens back to the some of my earlier experimentations.

Here, then, is the synchronicity of the moment:

This afternoon, I picked up my mail and inside was a small package, mailed from a friend of mine who is the only other person I know who loves Jenny Holzer.

Enclosed was a note:

I’ve been carrying this around for 20 years.

Some strange things have happened, I have strange affections for it.

I’ve been meaning to send it to you for a while; it just seems like the right thing to do, there is an interesting energy around giving it to you.

(If I am wrong please feel free to give it back.)

It was a bound copy of Jenny Holzer’s Laments printed on onionskin.

It is difficult for me to describe how precise and perfect this is – how much it instilled me with a feeling of correctness. It completely changed the tone of my day – which has included my doctor telling me that he has some concerns and that they want to check for cancer.

I am not one to believe in signs and portents.

And yet, it feels like stars are aligning.

This is actually two plates, not one. The lower plate was struck in anger.

The Picky Eater is about a woman I was dating at the time, and the struggles we were going through. She was very picky about the food she ate. “Circle” was in in-joke between us. The ghost image in the background is supposed to be me but is actually a gesture drawing of a friend.

Many people argue this is the most solid piece of my etching series. I do not agree, but only because there exists (somewhere) another child printing of the same plates, “Broken Eater”. Broken Eater is the same plates, only chopped into about ten pieces, made after we broke up.

I do not have a copy of Broken Eater.

This started as a 2 second gesture drawing of a man walking across the street carrying a briefcase.

At the time, I was. . . extremely left-wing. Militantly so. The first Iraq war was in full swing; George Bush senior was in charge, life sucked for people like me.

I thought the man with the briefcase was hell bent on Arriving Somewhere, and nothing would stand in his way of Arriving There – not even someone dying on the street. This dovetailed into the “Good Samaritan” story, and I ran with it.

The first strikings of this plate (and I have one) show only the primary image. It was later that I added the image echo.

One of these prints is on a gallery wall someplace but I’ve forgotten where.

I wasn’t sure what this was about until I’d finished it. Originally, it was intended to be a “living” vision of a figure dancing. A friend, Mason, modeled several “mosh pit” dancing states for me (while holding onto a pole so he didn’t fall down).

Most of the drawings from that set would be turned into a commercial advertisement for a tuxedo shop. But one was pulled into this image.

I realized upon looking at it upside down, that it was an image of someone falling. The secondary effects (applied with spray paint and other nifty tools) brought “fire” to mind, and I saw that it was an image of Lucifer falling into Hell.