Its my belief that fear and contentment are very close to each other - so close that there are undetectable details between the two in some cases. Unrecognizable even to the person dancing on the edge between them. This allows artists to have some fun.
Take a walk down a sunlit path and notice the slight breeze twisting the birch and alder leaves at the ends of their moss laden branches. A mostly dry trail, save for the few odd puddles from a rainstorm a day earlier that's left a refreshing ghost in the air. All of a sudden you realize that the trail you've been traveling leads you right back to a familiar place from your past - a small farm weathered from years of abandonment with its many outbuildings left to decay.
You know the farm, but there are many details that have changed slightly. The small apartment above the barn is still there but you know not to take the stairs to the loft. It may be locked, it may not - you only know that you shouldn't go there for some reason. In the time you've stood studying the apartment, you realize you were actually outside looking in the whole time and there's a curious trail you never noticed that winds into the underbrush behind it. You take the trail because you have a message needing to be passed to someone on that trail - someone recognizable - you aren't sure who yet, but there is still comfort in that it is someone familiar.
The further you go down the trail, the more you realize you may never actually want to leave this place - this was your home at one point, and you aren't sure why you ever left. There is a lot of property here, and you can seemingly get to anywhere you want just by staying at the family farm.
Almost without warning you find the old friend you were looking for in a clearing, squatted down by a tree. He lives there now and doesn't appear to be as interested in you being there as you are to be there. After a few unpleasant exchanges made more through looks and noises than words, you realize the friend you've been talking to isn't your friend at all - possibly. Their face and expressions are not the same as they were. In fact, it isn't your friend but rather someone you don't know at all. Knowing not to make the situation worse, you run back down the trail to the place you know is familiar. It didn't seem to take as long to get back as it did to leave.
There still isn't anyone at your former home, which is both unsettling and somehow comforting at the same time. You run up the stairs into the loft you would never have gone in before, only to realize that its a much larger area than you thought was possible; the size of a large dining hall, or maybe a temple of some kind. Standing at what you assume to be at the front of the temple is a person with familiar mannerisms with their back to you - yelling, or trying to, you fail to get their attention enough for them to even turn around in acknowledgement.
Then you wake up.
As an artist, you are usually at your most creative when you're mind is simply coasting - closest to that point in the day when your brain will just be entertaining itself by updating and downloading shit from the cloud while your body takes a break from the things its done, and has yet to do.
The human brain's gift to us are these 5 to 20 minute episodes that feed on our terrors, beliefs, memories, and collective life experience, (good and bad) that it sometimes gives back to us our own fear wrapped in the contentment of something familiar to us.
A lot of the creatures and things I've drawn and painted over the years are inspired by unsettling dreams I've had. Its why I think fear and contentment are so close. There is always a balance between the two for me, and the line is very thin between them.
As an artist, I can appreciate those slight little changes, or devils, in the details.