Toly: I did that cause they're interesting; because it is a comic kind of stereotype of you know like a big Lichtenstein or something like that. I use words to draw the viewer in, to tell a story but I'm not really, so I try to encapsulate, I try to bring together a story within one frame.

Chris: However by using text that is confusing, you're saying that it is trying to engage the viewer

Toly: Yeah.

Chris: Have you contemplated the thought that the idea potentially by confusing the viewer you're actually putting up a barrier between them and yourself, between them and the painting?

Toly: That's possible.

Chris: Through the confusion you either get it or you don't. There's nothing you can hang your hat on. Although I'm certain that if you took all the ones that are absurdist in their use of text, and put them together, then there would be a much different effect on the viewer, than there is now by having them scattered through out the exhibition. Do you use that effect to engage the viewer? Or is this a tactic used in order to emphasize the chaos within paintings?

Toly: Yes.

Chris: Why would you want to emphasize the chaos as opposed to something else?

Toly: My worldview, I guess, the world is in chaos.

Chris: In most of your paintings you portray people as ugly and monster like...

Toly: I don't know. People put on masks, and those masks are sometimes violent and the real person between all those layers of hypocrisy and guilt and just all that bullshit that they've fed themselves since they were children and it just shines through and I just want to paint it.

Chris: You seem to use a lot of warm colors, pinks and purples and they are greatly contrasted by the dramatic violent images.

Toly: Yeah I was thinking "Ice cream" getting killed while eating ice cream.

Target Practice - 20" x 15"

Chris: Is this a conscious thing where you're saying okay this is a relatively violent painting therefore make it more gentile by using warm and fuzzy colors.

Toly: No it was an actual thought for the whole series, ice cream getting killed, somebody eating ice cream and getting killed while eating ice cream. Something that is supposed to cool you off on a summer's day and you get your brains blown out.

Chris: "Tiger's outcall" integrates mixed media, why did you choose those certain passages?