Some of my subjects come straight from my immediate milieu and others I stumbled upon purely by chance. Nevertheless, I ended up with an offbeat array of contemporaries of diverse ethnicities, nationalities, and callings. Comprising this eclectic and compelling group, among others, are a Chinese Shaolin kung fu master, a Turkish actor, a German avant-garde singer, a Bosnian filmmaker, and my wife, an aspiring Japanese children’s book illustrator.

The obvious commonality between my subjects is that they all pursue the arts in one form or another (in one case the martial arts). As artists I consider them my peers, although I would never presume to put myself on their level of skill or achievement.

What further unites (and ultimately divides) this colorful bunch is that they are all, perhaps because of their unique gifts, fierce individualists with a firm belief in their own ideals and ambitions. They are, in effect, dreamers, reveling in their own personal self-imagined worlds, far-removed from the prevailing indoctrinated consensus reality.