The weight of our heaven bears down on the world, giving it a perpetually startled expression. The unseeing eyes and ill-fitting gas mask offer scant protection for it's round and vulnerable body.

This flawed and gorgeous apparatus is held together by us. Held up by the belief that it matters. We are the center of this Ptolemaic universe, and lives (the figures suspended below the globe) hang in the balance--hang on one child's trust in her father not to let go
  "Don't screw it up!"
  "Its already screwed up."
  "Don't screw it up!"--against a backdrop of child's drawings--first attempts to make metaphor from the world.

Copernicus had it wrong. The universe does revolve around us. We are gods. Gods 'R' Us.

Flagship   view painting
When you turn away, all thatšs left of the day is a streak of red and some smoke on the horizon. Down the road, a small procession. The empirešs flag ship, the American family, is sailing in circles on dry land. A collection of corporate logos stuck on a plywood devil leads the parade, while the logos of god and country bring up the rear.

Conjuring a fictitious past of moral certainty and righteousness by which to judge the present, the fool remembers the feel of the perfect punch he never landed and proclaims himself the winner. And we concentrate on keeping our places in the procession, our self conscious footsteps carving a beautiful circle into the desert floor.  (2004)

Deus ex Machina I   view painting
The deity enters the scene tangled up in his own conveyance. So this is celestial intervention? It's not quite what we had in mind. The god is the ancients' version a being with troubles of his own, struggling for dignity in an often dark and chaotic world. His rigging, while lending him a means of transport, has also rendered him a little less than fully in control. He is a god made in the image of man, capable not only of survival but also of deriving beauty,grace and humor from the struggle.

Papa's Brand New Bag   view painting
The bag is both literal and metaphoric. As a stand in for the human body it tells a story of a life. Its form, lacking any outstanding external features, emphasizes the volume, the contents under the slightly sagging skin. It is the body as vessel, a vessel filled blow by blow with hopes and dreams, disappointments and victories. Hanging with some dignity, it sways slowly in front of the childlike idealized landscape, the dimly remembered dream.

The Sugarland Paintings   Study for Sugarland, I
Driving through central Florida last year, I was aware of a familiar but unexpected feeling. One that I get often on the juniper savannas in my home state of New Mexico. It was an old energy, a low vibration or hum like I wasn't alone in the landscape, even though there was no one else around. As night came, I approached a town, Clewiston I think, and the glow from the fires in the surrounding sugar cane fields grew more intense. The smoke was thick, and the stacks of the sugar refineries towered over the landscape adding their own spew to the mix. A sign on the entrance to a run down trailer court across from the gas station where I stopped read,"Sugarland- spaces to rent." As I pumped my gas, I was struck by the obvious irony the cliched image of a child's fantasy world being tagged to this all too real place of hard work, dirty refineries and burning fields of cane. And even then, not to own, but only to rent. But the light from the fires against the night sky, illuminating the huge masses of smoke from below was really beautiful. And there was still that low hum. That spirit that wove itself through the landscape, through centuries of life and death, struggle, horror and ecstasy, and tied me to the place with a sense of wonder that was much more poignant than simple fantasy.

Later, when I began the first of several paintings of couples wrestling/ dancing/ carrying each other, I was reminded of that night in central Florida and realized that this was my central metaphor for these paintings men and women searching and struggling, sometimes together, sometimes against each other, for a happy place, a "Sugarland" that exists only in their imagination. The reality of their journey is much more complex, rich, heartbreaking, ancient, ambiguous, contradictory, funny, ecstatic, and ultimately, I hope, even more beautiful than the fantasy they may or may not share.

The romantic relationship is a dance, and sometimes a wrestling match, with innuendo of danger, sex, and craziness, performed, at times awkwardly, and sometimes with amazing grace and beauty.

The Artist on Sex
In response to a question from THE Magazine, here are several thoughts on the relationship of sex to my art:

1) Art is like sex: an individual could survive without it, but a civilization cannot.

2) The stretched canvas responds to the touch much like human skin, and painting from the human figure is never just an objective study of forms. Therešs no such thing as the "innocent eye," and why would you want one anyway?

3) Down in the metaphor mine, the sexuality vein is one of the richest. Sex metaphors can speak powerfully of politics and human behavior.

4) And, while it's possible to infer sexual innuendo from almost any image these days, even Freud once said, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."  (11/14/01)