Editor’s note: Every Wednesday, variety writer Katie Andrew will profile a different local artist. This is the seventh installment in the series.

All work and no hyperactive attention deficit disorder makes Tate Foley a very dull boy. The painter gone printmaker gone photographer keeps impulse at his fingers as he shatters the English language all over his page.

“I like to take words and change them, flip the letters to make new letters, paint out certain letters to make new words altogether,” said Foley, a second year graduate printmaking student. The practice he describes is evident in one of his drawings, which features the text “Oh holy, how divide,” the last word having plainly been altered from its original, “divine.”

Foley said he doesn’t consider himself very literary, but maintains a constant enthusiasm for text.

“Whenever I look at anything in the world, text is the first thing I see,” he said. “It is the constant truth in my art. Text comes out in a lot of my pieces as the only image, the only object.”

When it comes to capturing the spark that motivates his hand, Foley’s instincts are his greatest stimuli. Drawing ideas from blogs and other “Web 2.0″ outlets, Foley enjoys applying inspiration directly to his work.

“A lot of [my art] is immediate reaction to art that I see,” he said. “I try to take that and flip it into something I can use. The barn, for instance.”

On a recent road trip to Chicago, Foley encountered the Midwestern alternative to billboards.

“Barn advertising is huge in that part of the country.”

With some editing, of course, the artist recreated the wryly comical image of rural advertising.

Though somewhat bashful about his multi-medium mastership, Foley admits to being galvanized by his own photography.

“I don’t usually call myself a photographer, but it’s a huge part of my work,” he said.

“Mainly what I’m working with now is photography, but not in a high art realm. I don’t show it in critiques; I don’t use it in my school work.”

Foley describes his fascination with the art form as a way of “creating images very quickly” to be refined and applied later to his sketches and paintings.

In line with his spontaneous artistic operation, Foley prefers not to over-think things.

“Some current critical theorists say work like mine comes from working in your lizard brain – it’s your most primitive sense,” he said.

Sponsors of the lizard brain theory attribute artistic thoughts to the suspension of judgement, the phenomenon of human reasoning.

That is, when more complex, analytical thought is suspended, the mind will become more receptive to instinctual thoughts. This type of brain activity, powered by the so-called “lizard brain” provides those basic, “gut feelings” people sometimes experience.

“Whatever you can think comes out,” Foley said. “The time it takes to come from your brain to your hand is as miniscule as possible.”