We have a saying in my house when I talk about things that sound a little too technical for my wife.

Actually there’s a big body language component as well.

My wife will roll her eyes and simply say “you’re f-stopping me. ”

It’s a little inside joke about the days some 25 years ago when I was getting started in photography and I would talk about the best aperture, or f stop,  I needed to get the best shot in black and white.

I can still remember the day I fell in love with contemporary hard rock as though it were yesterday.

It was in early May 2011 and my wife and I took a long drive up the coast to have lunch at Nick’s Cove nestled hard on Tomales Bay about 90 minutes north of San Francisco.

On the way there, we turned on Octane, SiriusXM’s hard rock-metal station. It hit us like a thunderbolt, and I Shazammed a ton of songs on the trip.

After that, I started downloading them by the dozen. I listened to them while driving, working out, and especially skiing. As I write this, I have created 68 playlists with 14 songs each. That’s 926 songs encompassing 2.2 days of music — with no repeats.

So, yeah, I’m into it, especially because this style of music and the bands behind them are so positive, motivating and uplifting .

I have to say that being able to share my art with my dad during his final days on this Earth gave me a lot of joy.

We were fellow writers who actually worked together for a bit and were very close. He was a big fan of my art. So, sending him pictures of my new paintings was a great new form of communication for us.

And for my painting the “End of Forever,” I threw in a little Easter egg for him — the snow-covered mountain in the upper right.

Dad knew immediately that it was a reference to Mount Fuji, which he and my brother and I set out to climb one summer day in 1970. In this painting it represents a spiritual element as it is considered one of three sacred mountains in Japan and has been the site of pilgrimages for centuries. While we had to turn back due to inclement weather that day, I consider completion of this painting as a fitting conclusion of that personal journey.

Even as a kid I was a big fan of poetry and started writing my own poems by the time I was 10.

As a teenager that came in handy when my friend and I would get together for art projects. I would write lyrics to songs and also inscriptions for some of our posters.

About  a decade later, I arrived in Detroit from Kansas City to cover the auto industry as a journalist. At the time, I still had a bit of a drawl, a mixture of Midwestern and Southern.

To be sure, I would sometimes lay it on a little thick so folks would underestimate me. And it worked…until one day…

I don’t have the empirical data to prove it but my gut tells me most artists crave recognition.

No, I’m not suggesting that contemporary painters are dying to be named the “new Basquiat” or the “new Warhol.” But what’s the point of toiling away for hours on paintings if no one in the world knows about it? Plus, being famous sure helps getting more sales, not to mention invites to all the hottest parties in town.

Irony abounds. In my case, despite the fact that I have appeared on national TV shows dozens of times and have been featured in publications like USA Today and Wall Street Journal for my exploits as a journalist, financial analyst and musician, I wanted anonymity.

See, I had taken a 45-year break from the visual arts. So, when I got back into it, I wanted to get honest feedback from friends, fellow artists and gallery owners.

That’s why I created my alter ego, Ray Montenegro, as my painting name. In fact, one of my very early paintings is titled “Introducing Ray Montenegro.”

Here’s the thing. It started off as both an inside joke as well as a satirical self portrait that also was a bit of a mash up. Let me explain.

Who says a low-cost impulse buy can’t lead to cool art?

Not me, that’s sure. I’ve proven it can be done. After all, despite being only 12 square inches, my painting “Noz (Not Noz)” has had a big impact on Instagram, where it has rave reviews along with several hundred likes.

I say all this not to boast (well maybe just a little) but to make a serious point. As an artist you never know when inspiration will strike.

And a bonus point…it pays to trust your gut on these things. Your subconscious mind just might be speaking to you.

Here’s how it all went down.

When my older daughter Jordan was about eight or so, she used to enjoy looking at my art books. In particular, she was drawn to one I have about Miro.

I would sit in my big black leather chair in the living room with her on my lap. We would leaf through the Miro book together, and she was pause on paintings that really drew her attention.

Jordan would often point to specific parts of an image and laugh out loud. She like the fact that Miro’s work wasn’t too serious, just the opposite in fact; it’s the type of humor that seems subtle to adults but kids get right away.

All that came to fruition when I painted “Belly Of The Beast,” as I took a whimsical, almost childlike approach to the painting. It all paid off because this artwork has become something of a signature piece that has garnered hundreds of likes and comments on Instagram.

I believe it’s because that painting embodies my playful approach, my color story and my link to the power of unconscious symbolism in art. In that regard, the painting has become a bit of a Rorschach test..

I’ve always been fascinated by the big questions of life -- the nature of the human race, why we are here in the first place and where we are going.

I consider myself a deeply spiritual person, and for that reason, I think a lot about the nature of the human race and the world around us.

Moreover, I believe that we are here for a purpose, one that remains deeply mysterious, and that it is our duty to extend our intelligence as much as we can here on Earth — and well beyond. Are you listening Jeff and Elon?

It might not be obvious at first, but a lot of those ideas are embedded in my painting “Featuring Anaximander And the Mystery Achievements.”

As often happens with the arts, what at first seems like serendipity actually does make logical sense.

Take what happened with my painting “Dance Cadaverous.” It’s literally a mashup of Picasso and Warhol.

And it started with me singing a line from one of my favorite protopunk songs that my wife overheard. The line is question is “Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole, not in New York.”

I always loved that 1976 song by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.

One morning I was standing in the kitchen when I sang that line. Picasso was on my mind a lot because I had recently been teaching myself formal drawing by copying several images from a big book of his art.

‘’So, is that your next painting?” Tracy asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “Let’s see how it goes.”

As we now know it went pretty well, and we have gotten a lot of very positive response to that painting on Instagram even though we can’t formally promote because it has a “bad word” on it.

I had not been painting for very long, at most about two years, when I got a great compliment from a local pro.

My wife and I are passionate art collectors and we invited Allison OK Frost and her husband over for dinner. We had recently purchased a couple of Allison’s watercolors that were erotic in nature.

Allison went to one of my paintings without even knowing it. At the time, I was working under the pseudonym Ray Montenegro.

“Wow this background reminds me of Monet,” Allison said. “It’s lush and complicated.” (That specific painting was this one.)

Little did she know…

If ever there was an artist born to create a painting about the crypto currency revolution, it’s yours truly.

Please don’t think I’m saying that to boast. It’s just that I have a very strong background in economics, particularly regarding money and banking.

See, I have an honors economics degree with a special emphasis on the monetary system. For a time, I covered financial services as a newspaper reporter and also wrote a book about the savings and loan scandal of the late 1980s.

Not only that, but I got to spend some time with my hero, the late Nobel winner and noted monetarist, Milton Friedman. And on top of all that, as a financial analyst for my day job, I began recommending Bitcoin in the summer of 2013, long before it hit mainstream consciousness.

Now you know why the details of “Guardians of the Temple” are so important to me both personally and professionally.

By now you already know that at heart I’m a hard rocking guy.

But as a “boomer of a certain” age, I like to stay on the cutting edge of the hottest bands in the world today, like I Prevail, Rival Sons and Grammy winners Halestorm.

Ironically, a few months after Covid 19 hit, I woke up one morning with an old Rolling Stones song in my head — 19th Nervous Breakdown. 

And when I say old, I mean old. It hit No. 2 on the US charts in…drumroll roll please…early 1966, long before even the parents of most of my art fans were born.

That song seemed to crystalize what was going on with all the financial panic, economic shutdowns and high-anxiety media coverage about the pandemic.

As luck would have it, I had already embarked on a series of paintings inspired by the Coronavirus. It’s called the “Spirits of Babylon.”

When most folks think of gravity, they usually consider in light of scientific or physical aspects of our world.

After all, if there were no gravity, there’d be no human race…we would have floated out to space before we even left the oceans, assuming they could exist without the “spatial glue” that keeps us on the planet.

But applied to pop culture, gravity has a second context. Poets and musicians often use it as a metaphor for the tendency of some of us to keep being pulled back, often to a life we’d like to leave behind. It’s their twist on the phrase, “the gravity of the situation.”

I was thinking of this nearly 20 years ago when I wrote the tune Gravity’s Smile. It was all about being set free and it was a reaction to punk icon, poet and heroin addict Jim Carroll’s song “Wicked Gravity.” 

Talk about a giant metaphor for the human condition.

Oh yeah, and it’s also a bit of an oxymoron.

Let me explain. When I first heard the term “social distancing” as it regards ways to thwart the spread of Covid, I couldn’t help but see the larger issues at play here.

It really begs the question: how can you be both distant and social, especially if everyone is wearing a mask.

Here’s the thing. To me, this whole subject is ripped right out of Jung and Shakespeare

To say that my painting “Super Novocain” was inspired by the Covid pandemic and the stress surrounding it is an understatement.

In mid-April 2020 as the virus was ramping up nationally, yours truly was sick as a dog. I woke up in the middle of the night with so much congestion in my chest I felt like I was drowning.

Yes, I’ll admit it, I was quite anxious about it. After all, I reasoned, if the beginning of the virus was this bad, I must be headed for the hospital like hundreds of thousands of others in the US.

I’ll always remember the first time I heard the song Chalk Outline by the Canadian hard rock group Three Days Grace.

My wife and I had just gotten involved in the contemporary hard rock scene, and I was building up my music collection.

Here’s the thing. I had just retired from from the Bay Area music scene where I had performed more than 150 live shows and put out four full-length CDs.

My last band was focused on roadhouse blues and roots rock, playing a combination of my original songs and covers. For that reason, I was mostly listening to older songs that I could play with that band.

So, when I started to listen to hard rock, it was an exciting breath of fresh air. Today’s bands feature great musicianship, excellent songs and powerful hooks.

And that is clearly the case with “Chalk Outline,” one of my favorites by Three Days Grace. The lyrics tell a great story of abandoned love.

At one point, the singer says “the dead can’t speak, and there’s nothing left to say anyway. All you left behind…is a chalk outline.”

If you’ve followed along with my art for even a short while, you know how much I’m fascinated by high-concept painting.

Indeed, its in the tagline of my website that my work often contains “Big Ideas.”

And that is certainly true of “The Seduction of Mimi.” Basically, this is my story of how human evolution meets the transhumanist revolution, the fusion of humans, robotics and AI.

And just think, I owe a lot of this bold, colorful painting to a missing piece of paper.

Let me explain. See, as passionate as I am about painting, I generally take the winter off and close the studio.

That’s because I love skiing up at Tahoe. To avoid the heavy traffic and massive crowds up there, I almost always go during the week.

I check the weather forecast every single day and am always basically packed and ready to go on a moment’s notice if a storm is coming in.

In other words, from late December to mid April, it’s all about hitting the slopes.

Last winter, due to Covid, all the ski areas shut down early. So, there I was in March, ready to open the studio a month early.

I went to my ideas folders where I could have sworn I had a cool idea waiting for me. It was one that appealed to my mischievous sense of humor.

The sketch featured a fish looking into an aquarium and seeing strange objects inside, probably people. I loved the idea of turning the idea of people watching fish on its head.