My paintings rely on the structural abstractions available to drawing: drawing precedes and sometimes exceeds the paint, as I draw over the body-skins of oil, oil stick, and collage, like graffiti on walls or like tattoos. Cosmos and crisis, entanglement and lyric, mood of place. 

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Painting confronts materials including oil stick, collage, and dye on hand made stretchers, with an effect of low relief or polychrome panels. 

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What is the deep ecology of Turtle Island. Where are the doors in time.  A lifelong obsession begun in my Great Plains childhood. With Sedgwick I'm working on reparative reading. The proximity of drawing to writing; the hand in hand of painting to sculpture as a temporal medium. What does land back mean. This is Salinan country. Chumash also. Up the road the San Miguel Mission exhibits the ceramics of those whose land is stolen, whose language was suppressed. 

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What is the proximity of writing to drawing? What is the relation of collage to 'real' estate? My ancestors taught in an 'Indian school.' How is  learning process, a demonstration of 'model-dependent realism,'  (following Stephen Hawking). There are perseverance, continua, fugues, not explained in linear sequences. The reverse, the B side matters. 

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Around here, the water table is artesian. Content comes up. The Salinas River is flowing south to north. 

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I live and work alongside a swamp, with raptors and bees, raccoons, skunks, coyotes, tarantulas. Chaparral plants thrive on ledges of schist. Clay soil in  soft wetlands support redwoods, sycamore, alliums.  We grow our food.  Around us is a town called Atascadero, 'stuck in the swamp.' The assemblage of swamp wrack is mattering, like a sore eye. 

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When I try to image  myself, as in the painting, "Sunflower vs the Windigo",  body or  face are very nearly melting. 

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