I recently watched a video about how in olden days, people and artists believed that artistic "genius" (a word that then meant an external force or being that granted you artistic ability) was a separate entity from one's ego.

She attributes the attachment over time of this great power to humans themselves to burdening artists of all kinds with a creative responsibility that a single person should not and cannot possibly handle, thus creating the highly pressured and miserable artist we know (and are) today.

After thinking about it for a while, I figured maybe I'd try mentally and spiritually separating my artistic ego from my own. Charles, the mechanical fish you see here, is representative of many of my artistic, musical, and scientific interests. He's cartoony and wacky and everything that embodies my own creativity, and he is his own entity now as far as I'm concerned. If my art is bad, it's because he wasn't doing so well that day. If it's good, he should get the credit. He is the mental spirit I've created to personify my own creative "spark", if you will.