About Stories in the Desert

For sixteen years I lived in New Mexico, south of Santa Fe, where the land was dry, somewhere between desert and grassland. A lot of my art depicted fortuitous scenes set upon a desert stage. The “stage” was one of junipers, rocks, dry arroyos and grass, with the blue sky, the clouds and the sunsets, the stars and the full moon above. The paintings in this gallery could just as easily fit into the Magic Kingdom Gallery, except that the desert landscape became very much a part of the story.

There is a spirit to where I lived in the desert, a spirit ancient and ever present, a merging of characters into a light, a foreign sentiment, dancing over the everyday landscape. Sometimes this spirit would embrace me, and sometimes I would embrace the spirit in my art. It was more an intuitive process of discovering the intimacy of an otherwise austere place, to hold up a desert mirror, to see my reflection there, and in my eyes seeing the other looking in, reflecting back my own reflection.

These stories are where the reflections have taken me.