Tibetan Monk in Shark Jaw (acrylic on canvas) - "I started with the idea of a mandala.  Deborah Klimberg gave me a shark's jaw, and I saw the mandala, and I said, ah-hah, that's my mandala.  So I started with that, and I divided it - I decided to have these paintings now really centered.  I admitted that the Light came from the center, and that the center was the thing.  And then I drew a line between the water and the sky, and painted that.  Then I went to the museum and got a lot of demony things, and things that I'd drawn in West Africa, things that I'd found in the museum that are voodoo, and really scary things with crow skulls on the side of their heads and strange grasses and clubs that go bang in the night - things like that!  And there's a mixture of some Alaskan things and different sorts of demons.  Then I put this fish skeleton in because that's that same carp that I've kept all this time, that I had in my watercolors earlier.

"Then I knew something was missing very much.  I knew something was missing, so it just happened that Damadipo was showing me some photos.  He had a picture of Chantral Rinpoche, and he has a sort of earthy look, that kind of earthy, down to earthy but beyond earthy look, that keeps things from being too sentimental.  I don't like that sentimental swishey-timey sweet saccharin stuff in my spiritual... it had a kind of guts to it that I liked.  So I said there he is, and I put him right in at the last."