Portfolios
Celestial Presence
Nature As Being
Night Swimming
Soul Mirrors
Terms of the Heart
Celestial Presence
Circadian Rhythms
Living in a wild place surrounded by wild things merges the lines of what defines my daily experience as both a vessel of human consciousness and as a simple organism in the biosphere. It sorts out pretty quickly any separate strands of self into a functional braid that has very little use for conflicting points of view. All metaphors and meanings are dissolved between nature and the essence of my experience, and their boundaries are intertwined. Aspects of body and architecture, language and light, color and form, movement and line mix to express inclination, sentimentality, and predisposition into a play of consciousness and presence; interior and exterior.
Autumn Tides
On my land, I have had the opportunity to live more deeply with each season than I have been able to in the past. I found that in addition to the familiar big rhythms, there are smaller movements, which further define and detail the atmosphere and natural processes. “Autumn Tides” is a painting depicting these…
Spring Evening
In Northern Idaho, there is definitely a season after winter, but for most of that period, it wanders along in a state of cold, wet bark, dangerous ice, and deep mud to the hips. The presence of a full and conscious spring as I have known it in other places seems as if it will…
Luminous Winter Night
The extraordinary luminosity reflected from the outer wall of the forest to the open ground in front of it creates a dramatic setting of atmospheric light and shadow in every day and night of every season. The road to my land provides such an environment, and I have seen many such scenes. It first crosses…
Crazy Clouds And Beautiful Koans
For New Years in 2017, I spent ten days in silent meditation on Cloud Mountain; a Zen Temple, in Oregon. As the name suggests, the mountain top location is often adrift in the clouds that roll off the Pacific Ocean and settle there. The seasonal cold has a distinct effect on the fog creating a…
Starlight
Helios reaches over the Selkirk Mountains with a pale tendril of light, transforms into various personalities throughout the day, and then makes its final heraldic retreat beyond the Monarchs. With its parting, a darkness descends so deep and final that your hand remains invisible, no matter how close you hold it to your face. Oh, but on clear nights, you can treat your soul to a mystical journey of celestial illuminations. Skylight that shines down from a lantern-like moon or a purple crescent, to then transform into a rhapsody of shimmering galaxies. All around, the primitive and pristine earth seems plated with silver light from the stars, until the rotating sky slips, once more, into a spill of pitch-black ink.
The Night The Stars Fell
Unlike any other winter I know of, the winter in northern Idaho has captured my imagination. Here, the clear winter night is breathtaking; a magical view showing thousands of twinkling stars. In “The Night The Stars Fell,” I wish to portray how on nights when a bright distant moon lights on falling snowflakes, they may…
September Moon
This is the first place I have lived where I have experienced “starlight.” Looking up at the vastness of the night sky, the stars appear in multi-layered swaths of infinite distance and density. In summer, the lush forest has the final say in what happens on this land, cutting into the edge of the extraordinary…
Neon Sunset
The sun is always at an angle in my northwestern home. In summer when the length of day finally comes to a close, the darkened clouds and summer mists above the lake take on a neon glow that befits the end of a long joyful respite on the cool waters of Lake Pend Oreille.
Alive In The Night
Sometimes, visitors seem to add mystery to the summer landscape, especially at night, when lanterns glow on the lake and between the trees appearing as low hanging moons and roughly strewn stars. What is especially strange is how they reveal the form of and provide locations for areas that are usually soaked anonymously in darkness. …
Nature as Being
Complexion of Identity
I have found that forest air breathes a mixture of exotic and thought-provoking sensibility. Lush fragrance wafts in a spectrum of seasonal breezes. Leaves' flutter, boughs' lift, and stones' chatter. Boulders' meditate. New growth plays in the sun, or trembles in the cold. Elder trees, knowing mosses and stoic outcroppings each share their tales of wisdom. Every aspect of the forest possesses unique and collective thoughtfulness, offering a never-ending array of actors and personalities.
View Over Selle Valley
My home sits on the edge of a cliff 200 feet above the Selle Valley. In a ten-mile view, the Schweitzer Mountains are against the sky, revealing a huge granite bowl with a multi-faceted ski area. The world between here and there abounds with snow, the morning air is full of electricity, and the frost…
April Deluge
When winter rains take on increasingly torrential proportions, it’s fair to assume the spring season has begun. Seasonal springs, overflow, and gush from the mountainside. Enormous icicles cleave into deeply muddied ground and evergreens dump bucketfuls of water from their thick canopy of tightly woven needles. The level ground is riddled with overflowing puddles and…
Last Light
“Last Light,” describes that time of year when the winter solstice has almost arrived. From my home above, the valley, the fields spread out in a dimmed coat of silver and at times, it seems only Jupiter holds a beacon to guide us into a gradual rekindling of the spirit through the longer nights.
Cold Snap
There are late autumnal mornings when the atmosphere freezes into a dry crispness. My breath crystallizes as soon as it leaves my lips. The folds in my jacket and jeans stiffen and make a light scratching sound. More importantly, the colors seem more vivid and the forms of the vegetation seem visually sharpened. My grandmother…
Mercurial Passages
Where I live, in Northern Idaho, at 48.2766° North by 116.5535 West, the sun is always at an angle and from the forest floor, its rays filter through a thick veil of towering old firs, spruce, pine, larch, hemlock, cedars and a dappling of paper birch and quaking aspen. The morning light, impish, trips down a distant path, then abandons all around into cool shadowed puddles, returning to embrace a poignant vignette with golden beams of warming, afternoon rays.
Giant Upon The Plains
Extraordinary weather phenomena, such as tornadoes are clearly terrifying, especially out on the Great Plains where you can see them moving as colossal towers between earth and sky, unpredictable in their wild path, extemporaneously destroying what had seemed so certain and solid. I find in the terrible reality of the ever more forcible storms a…
Hoping for Rain
The summer of 2014 brought an onslaught of horrific wildfires. Surrounding me, nature obscured, and darkened, and the sky filled with smoldering ash. As the summer burned on, the severity of the fires was merciless. It was the first time I heard the phrase ‘Super Storm’. Now, the discussion of Global Warming was no longer…
Dean’s Passage
The loss of a family member in early spring allowed me to search for his essence in the vast and multi-layered landscape typical of Northern Idaho. As it swirls upward from the deep lake, to the grass, through the wooded cliffs, up the towering crags of the mountains, lifts into great castles of floating clouds…
Night Swimming
American Angst
The uncertainty of near or far in a Northern Idaho forest is fascinating to me, unfolding old and new myths in my personal psyche, as I began to ponder my own presence among the trees. I've found that my personal exploration of this uncertain world holds mirrors remarkably different from those I have peered into in other locales. The imagery that came to me over the years began as simple explanations of natural phenomena, but through time have given way to archetypal and otherworldly narratives. They are, of course, autobiographical, my collections of layered womanhood and social consciousness: a series of concepts that speak, personally, of my internal and external existence.
Witness
Witness is a painting that speaks of all my mentors who have departed but have left me behind with their visions of art and life that included their hopes for me. I love them all for what they helped me to break up so that I could move on into my life as a mature…
The Uncertainty Of Gender
For a year or so, my eldest child came to live with me in the woods while transitioning her gender. During her stay, she noted the phenomena of figures between the trees. Many of them became like bogeymen in her psyche. We fought her troubling entities side by side. After that time, I began to…
The Good Book
The forest in the Pacific Northwest with its tall trunks, diagonal branches and slanted light has m, at times, seeing figures among the trees. My worries and concerns and inner dream world can create a sense of people and animals shimmering in and out of sight. The somber man in black who defies the rules…
Angels on the Doorstep
It is the visual and sensual aspects of the Church that I experienced as a child that still calls to me and puts me in the mind of a higher power, rather than the language that attempts to explain it. The environment struck awe in a young artist even though the interpretations seemed limited and odd. “Angels don’t have black hair,” my Grandmother once admonished, while examining a small painting I had created to please her. Startled, I looked into her face, at her dark eyes and jet- black hair with wonder. Was it possible that angels don’t have such beautiful hair, so glossy and black like the night sky? Fortunately, the conflict between her belief and her dark beauty was one of many things that helped me to determine that grace has no such preferences and has allowed me to continue to embrace my root religion, as symbolism and poetry as well as other sacred world beliefs, universal mythologies and personal inventions.
Mortal Sorrows
I painted Mortal Sorrows to help find personal answers to the troubles brewing beyond my 40 acres of wild land. Forty acres to foster is a large area and yet it is not enough to shelter me from the oncoming social and political crises. I have had a reoccurring nightmare for decades of desperately attempting…
Every Day Angels
I have come to a place recently where I feel that idealism no matter how soft or restrained is the only path to correcting civilizations many wrongs. Although there may be hordes of people who no longer believe in the power of pulling together and sacrificing for the good of all, there are small clusters,…
Soul Mirrors
The Paintings in “Soul Mirrors” are dream like states I cultivate from personal moments of mystery, joy and redemption. They all are a mix of how I find I can hold myself while also being held by the rhythms and goings on of nature. More than any other of my paintings they are autobiographical. Letting go of my past roles, beliefs and images of self is the major theme.
Inside The Rain
Inside the Rain is a representation of the kind of expansiveness I now feel about the concept of home. Here, after living a decade in northern wilderness I have found within me, a physicality of emotion and spirit that defies the boundaries of what is inside and outside, of me and not of me, with…
Morning Incident
Morning Incident is about all the tragedies that go on every day that fill a moment with big feelings or are completely missed and over shadowed by other dramas. Nature is full of this sort of thing as births and steps and flights and deaths move on in multiplex dimensions for no one and everyone…
Night Girl
Night Girl, speaks of all the things I never did and now will most likely never choose to do. In the last third of my life I have finally discovered that I can only be who I am, I am finally laying aside all the lifetimes I had imagined bringing to the one that has…
Waiting For Raven
Waiting for Raven is about the hours, days, weeks and months when I wait patiently for my loved one, an adult child who has schizophrenia, to appear for a short but remarkable moment as the person I raised and became friends with.
Abdication
Abdication is about letting go of self-identifying as a mother and wife. At times I see with great clarity how those roles no longer serve my family and that the nest if not literally is figuratively empty. I like those times because everything seems as if I have walked into a freshly washed world of…
Night Passenger
Night Passenger is the stillness that comes from watching other things move on and pass me, leaving behind scraps of memories, hopes both filled and unfulfilled linger like affable strangers and gracious specters
Terms of the Heart
“Terms of the Heart” as a category for my painting themes is almost the opposite of Soul Mirrors. The works are not so much about me as they are about my people and my species. They are all the things I want to say about our times, war, famine, the destruction of earth and her beings. At the same time they serve for me as incantations, suggestions and prayers for potential change as time flows on, eventually without me, my progeny and in the end all of us and who we ever were.
Missing Indigenous Sisters Memorial
Attention must be drawn to the killing and disappearance of the women and girls who belong to our Native American peoples. As of 2016, the US National Crime Information Center has reported 5,712 cases of missing American Indigenous women and girls, however, the U.S Department of Justice missing persons’ database has only reported 116 of…
Refugee Angel 2, Mixed Media on Wood 16x20x1
Although I consider myself a Buddhist, I have been gradually turning to the symbolic forms of religious display, early Christian symbolism and other forms of mysticism and mythology over the last five years. These elements bring stark attention to the images of modern human suffering, occurring throughout the world. At present, I have turned to…
No Water in Flint
I spent a good portion of my life living near the Great Lakes. The skies are more often than not filled with moisture. In the winter, the day sky, heavy and dense with ice, barely emits the sun’s rays and you can gaze directly at it as if looking from a watery depth. Existence in…
Night Vision
The Barn Owl is an intriguing character in the web of life on earth. Like many birds, it makes use of us in a way that could make a cat pale. “Thank you, mankind, for building the lofty beautiful straw-filled home that shelters me and my progeny from all our worthy foes. Thank you for providing…
Listening To The Wind
Having lived in open rural environments for much of my life, I have an awe for the voice of the wind over all else. It dazzles and entertains by rolling the grasses of the plains into seas of gold, the leaves of trees into turning plates of color and orchestras of sounds, and it tickles…
The Promise Of Humanity
What is the promise of Humanity? It may seem that there is little positive about who we are. The ways we have chosen to live is short sighted and thoughtless, out of touch with the rest of our world with cringe worthy if not criminal negligence. So, much of what we have created for our own…
Mother Wisdom
It’s pretty clear to me that if we need to save the world from ourselves that our government must be Matriarchal. Women when left to their own set of principles and systems are natural caretakers. It is in every cell of our existence to sacrifice self so that our children will not suffer and have the…