In late 1996, just a few months after returning to the United States, I was motivated to show people that my painted woodcarvings were twice as much work as other art forms. In fact, my works are really the synthesis of two art forms. The carving would take a long time to complete, and then doing the painting, it felt like I was starting a completely new piece. So I said to myself, "I’m going to show people how much work this is, and paint a completely different image over the next carving." The questions then became, what and why? As I thought about it, I realized that it would be the ‘relationship’ of imagery from the two disciplines that would end up becoming the real subject of the work. It’s hard for me to remember exactly what was going on in my head at the time, but I think I knew before I even began the painting stage that I was on to something huge.

In this piece, the school of fish is moving in opposite directions. The Earth map’s equator overlaps right where the fish change direction. This is intended to reflect the phenomena of how the Earth’s rotation appears to change from clock-wise to counter-clock-wise depending on which hemisphere (northern or southern) your perspective happens to be in. But also, "World School" is linked to that time in my life when I had just returned to the USA after living abroad for four and a half years. ….When my perspective was pointing towards a worldview and I was suffering from reverse culture shock.