High Up, Down Low depicts a dark and grimy city beneath a web of impossibly high skyways filled with rushing trains and cars.  The figure at the bottom of the painting is trapped in an overstimulating, machine-driven world, tethered and struggling but reaching for the light and the freedom high above.  The depressingly dark city, the anxiety of the red brushstroke, and the dizzy vertigo of the highways in the sky represent a fear of leaving a familiar misery for uncharted possibilities.