Moving On

My art has been profoundly shaped by my youth in North Texas and wandering in the Great Southwest. Admittedly, the work manifests conflicting tendencies toward representation and abstraction, public and private meaning. This body of work engages both the external world and its surrogates, the images themselves. It explores territory seen in the rearview mirror: How do we deal with the western landscape? How do we deal with change? Does the art try to preserve an idealized past? I hope not. A horizontal glyph across the bottom of each work is a mark for our spiritual journey. Birds, because of their ability to fly anywhere, represent free agency and our free will. Reptilian and bound human figures are my visual vocabulary for the things we are “fated to,” just as snakes and turtles are irreversibly connected to place. Incomplete figures illustrate our striving to become fully human, emotionally and spiritually. Detritus used in each combine serves to document the date and the place, just as the art documents my experience on the journey.