The following portfolios are various figurative and personal responses to place in the Four Corners region where I relocated in 1992. It is crossed with boundaries - personal, tribal, political and government, and embedded with conflicts about race, gender, professional and economic pursuits.
All I knew of myself when I arrived is shown in the series titled Six Women completed just prior to my decision to come to Cortez. There is much to interpret in the large paintings. Simultaneously, I created four large figurative images about the relationship between land, the cosmos and human beings. We are of it, I told myself. When I arrived in Cortez a Navajo/Russian professor of botany bought all four. He later traded one back with me for a large landscape about canyon willow and snow. I keep the one he traded back in my personal collection as a reminder that people who like an artist's work are changlings, too; their interest is present tense; active, positive and engaged in a relationship to our images, not just the artist.
The narratives in the following selected works show conflicting life and death impulses - the urge to change, accept healing, recreate life, show danger when it exists. Soon after I arrived the subject of deep loss emerged reflecting questionable identity with the familial, presumed safety of the community I left behind. The images grew from my need to work through fifty years of cultural indoctrination and the domination of preoccupied, self-centered urban lifestyle.
Some description accompany the selected work that follows here.
All I knew of myself when I arrived is shown in the series titled Six Women completed just prior to my decision to come to Cortez. There is much to interpret in the large paintings. Simultaneously, I created four large figurative images about the relationship between land, the cosmos and human beings. We are of it, I told myself. When I arrived in Cortez a Navajo/Russian professor of botany bought all four. He later traded one back with me for a large landscape about canyon willow and snow. I keep the one he traded back in my personal collection as a reminder that people who like an artist's work are changlings, too; their interest is present tense; active, positive and engaged in a relationship to our images, not just the artist.
The narratives in the following selected works show conflicting life and death impulses - the urge to change, accept healing, recreate life, show danger when it exists. Soon after I arrived the subject of deep loss emerged reflecting questionable identity with the familial, presumed safety of the community I left behind. The images grew from my need to work through fifty years of cultural indoctrination and the domination of preoccupied, self-centered urban lifestyle.
Some description accompany the selected work that follows here.