About Desert Stories

The first painting I did with skeletons, Sunset Love, was for a Day of the Dead show in Madrid, NM. I did not read up about the Day of The Dead. As a starting point there were images of smiling skeletons having a good time. I did not know about La Catrina, patron goddess of the Day of the Dead, whose likeness was in a lot of the artwork in Madrid and elsewhere. After Sunset Love I took a liking to painting skeletons. They became an emblem of liberation, a “shrug of the shoulder” at the oppressive catechism of reductionism, materialism, and the anti-nature mechanizations of capitalism. Yes, the celebratory nature of the Day of the Dead became, for me as an artist, a statement of liberation. I could see La Catrina as a Hip Death Goddess outside of Wall Street, The Empire, in which all of us are swimming, As she dances more cracks spread in the likeness of a Tree of Life on the face of the dam, the Wall, holding the reservoir of our waking world, the mind set of the Empire: eventually breaking, sending us out into the unknown, another death, another life, where the Hip Death Goddess will deliver us to a peaceful kingdom full of wondrous imperfection.