Bust explores a talismanic presence - a mysterious personal totem or spirit figure in both human and animal form. Stonehouse describes the source of these figures as dreams in which he “sense[s] a figure or presence that is lurking just out of sight, maybe somewhere just behind […], down very low or looming above.” In these paintings, it is as if the artist is rendering each facet of his fears and hopes and dreams and worries. The paintings speak to the confusion and the illogical nature of dreams - the topsy-turvy unsettled feeling when you wake up from a particularly intense session of REM. Stonehouse oscillates between including and not including text in his work. In the paintings where it is included, the chaos is contained by the words - the artist is able to decipher the message while in others with no text, the chaos looms large and we experience along with the artist that unexplainable feeling of waking from a dream with intensely illogical emotions that we sense deeply as truth.