Untitled for Now

The Sound of Horses Chasing my Son

A dream that has been repeated.  As a young child the family dog passed away. This big sweet Malamute's death was my first experience of loss.  After the death i remember being sad and frightened and then these nightmares began.  It was of a big dog that stood on his back feet and wore a dirty old trench coat.  The dog would just walk towards me and then I would awaken to run down the hall to jump into my parents bed and have them protect me from the Dog-Man.  A few years ago I came across an image of the devil as this three headed merman with wings and snakes for hands.  The central head was an old man with this masculine beard curling over his chest on either side of his head was a beast like head, one of which  reminded me of my childhood grieving process and the nightly visits from the Dog-Man. I worked that image over and over but I could not create the context, the scenario, the fore and back ground.  There was so much potential in just the figure, but how to put him within the whole?  I worked through forests, butterflies, boats, water, horses, and glowing halos. There are so many layers and painted over ideas.   The painting that finally emerged has so much information and history for me.   The horses have emerged to take center stage.  Four horses, with no riders, with no carriage or burden.  But bound together, running and pulling a mysterious burden.  Perhaps it is a returning to the cycle and patterns that surround us always informing us.  A space where dreams are fermented from the stewing shadows of our own minds.  When I hold my son in the morning, waking him from his peaceful sleep, I want to know his dreams.  Where does his mind go when sleeping?  Will his sleep be visited by the emotions and occurrences of life that he does not know how to let go of?  Will he feel the pounding of the horses charging through his resting mind?  Will I again be visited by the bearded man with three faces?  Dreams fascinate me, they feel so charged with meaning and profound understanding while they occur  Then i find the telling of them slips through the fingers like water back to the ground.  This is a canvas that was worked on for years, the refers back to my childhood, and joins with hopes and fears about the next generation of my family.

Mexican Sweater and Cowboy Memories

The physical work of creating this painting spans roughly four years of my life. The image of me in the lower right with my felt hat, mexican sweater, and plywood cut out of a Davie Crocket musket goes back to age three.  The stories i have about myself and my family, my brothers and who i am in this world has been retold and retold.  The striated bubbles that lead up the left side of the canvas is another depiction of the same idea.  There are these intense moments of connection where deliberately words are repeted.  The images have changed many times as I rework and try to follow the emotional impact of things that have happened to me.  It is not a way to find the facts of history.  It allows me to see how those things impacted me.  Circles that form a sense of receding space. Thought bubbles overlaying each other containing almost the same retellings of the situation that has been isolated or forgotten from the flow of our experience.  Certain moments get held onto with a tightness that is rarely forgiving. The retelling of these stories comes to define how we are seen.  I look at the images of naked women with birds flying from where a head should be and the corresponding smaller colder shadow of a torso., Silhouettes of American cowboys, and toy lions.  I do not want to understand what my work is about but instead to come to a place of realization that a discussion of engaging in a more informed way is possible.  What is my story?  What am committing to memory about my own identity?  How does the past continue to influence me today?  What is there in the shadows whispering to me?  What was it like to play Davey Crocket as a two year old with my older brother?  Where are the lady's heads?  

Composition in Blue; Twilight in Alta Plaza, daydreaming in Portuguese, when the Bohdi appears as a Live Oak

 60"x60" Acrylic on Canvas.  I last worked on this canvas a few years ago while living in San Francisco.  It is now one of the prominently displayed pieces at my studio.

An Abundance of Serotonin from Synesthesia

20"x 20", Acrylic on Canvas.

This is a canvas I have been working on for a few years.  I am pleased to have it be the first entry on this site.