1998-2000 Slipstream Andromeda paintings and drawings

Night flight over the Pacific. Suddenly, one of the jet engines catches fire. The predawn dark dominates jeweled lights of the city below. Fire persists in the fuselage. We fly down through thick fog into the waiting tarmac, laden with crash trucks and medics. By some miracle we are safe. Story of Andromeda: royal daughter, she is tied to a rock, where a chimera will have come to hunt her. In the wee hours Perseus navigates positions for the stranded. Andromeda galaxy,  next of kin to the Milky Way, will be his Polaris. Made during a dark time, in a studio once a cattle trader's den in the Kansas City Stockyards Exchange, these paintings record the nearly crashing, the safe haven, the save. As if the paint itself lets me slip into the wake of galaxy-girl, I want the largest possible extension and topography, being Perseus to the dilemma of the studio: here, where I throw pigment powder over stand-oil saturated panels and I pull mono prints from the powder on the floor. 

In those years I also undertook large scale watercolors based on the ground.They have a fly-through affinity to the paintings, as I see them now. Quivira is a locale whose name persists in the aura of Coronado's Entrada-soaked fantasy, but more, is  also a real place, ancestral lands of the Konza and Wichita nations, where at the end of the twentieth century, I lived. Several other watercolors in this series are in the collection of the Great Plains Art Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.