A r t i s t   S t a t e m e n t : Growing up in a rural county of St. Louis, Missouri just prior to the explosion of housing developments and strip malls, I was captivated by the numinous untamed hills, valleys and forests that shaped the landscape. In fact, the core of my work stems from those undulating vistas that stretched out and somehow attempted to tame the horizon. I remember finding comfort in the organic flow of natural forces, and in my work I try to recreate that feeling through an almost dream-like precision. I like seeing those landscapes again, realizing them again and recapturing the essential emotional impulse again. Each memory has an inherent force that has perpetuated its existence within in me, kept alive somehow, and in each rendering that force somehow directs the motion of the image and gives it a real and textured presence. My family and childhood friends always joked that I was born with a crayon in my hand, so it was no surprise to them when I began taking lessons at a very young age, learning the fundamentals of shape, figures, and color. During the mid-90's digital art and computer generated imagery began to heavily influence my work, and in the end it became a platform for my creative expression. I remember watching the animated film "Toy Story" by Disney's Pixar studio and being in awe of how they pushed the envelope of what was possible, how they ushered in a new era of pushing pixels to construct breathtaking imagery. In 2002, I joined a computer animation program and learned the disciplines of the emerging technique. By 2004, I had moved to Hollywood and have been providing digital artwork and CG animation for feature films and television ever since. While post production work is exciting and intensely challenging, my innate passion to create artwork is hardly satisfied inside the walls of a visual effects house. Out of this impulse my work has taken a path of its own, and despite the fact that I have been equipped with a modern arsenal of methods, the techniques I developed early on in my life are still the visible my work today. As a visual artist and have studied closely the work of masters van Gogh, Dali, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, da Vinci, Monet, Renior, Escher, and other giants. Perhaps because my brother Travis Mossotti is a working poet, I have also have been fortunate enough to find comfort and collusion between the written word and the visual image in writers like Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, C.K. Williams, Galway Kinnell, Billy Collins, B.H. Fairchild, William Butler Yeats. But too, because of my knowledge with technological applications, I find inspiration from artists like Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, Stan Lee’s comic book creations, Ansel Adams photographs, pop art experts like Mark Ryden, Greg “Crayola” Simkins and the great Walt Disney. The message these icons taught me is that all art (regardless of medium) is about the formation and expression of ideas; and it doesn’t matter whether the idea is a complex philosophical treatise or a passing observation, only that the idea resonates in a visceral and emotional way with its audience. I tend to relish in the magic of the adolescent imagination, to see romance in temporal and tragic nature of life, and I try to render those ideas in my living, moving landscapes and in the subjects of my paintings.