to the Quiet Stars
Explore past artworks and timeline to find the road to the Quiet Stars.
Duende, the Bull 1995. First exhibition of paintings.
The challenge of individuating, of defining myself, emerged as the content of my first series of paintings. A metaphor of the battle within, spirited by the sounds of flamenco and aesthetics of duende, my bullfight action paintings were my first professionally exhibited artworks. The intensity and action in the paintings were the refusal to accept the injustices I saw coming from the conservatism of the South and my escape from a questionable childhood. These paintings paved the way via scholarships to escape estrangement and poverty in rural Virginia bringing me back to my native California to attend the California College of Arts and Crafts, albeit a few years older than the average freshmen after my years teaching myself. There I studied abstract cinema and painting, creating films and the bull theme, like a minotaur, transformed to the labyrinth thread paintings.
Knossos 1999
4 miles of thread Knossos. Influenced by French 1960-70s philosophy. Deconstructing the painting medium, canvas to thread. Reconstructed thread as Labyrinth. Minimalist, calming yet optically activating. See Water Ghost and Bodhisattva artworks in The Quiet Stars.
Applied Aesthetics. Philosophy, Flamenco, Community Arts. Auroville India, 2002.
Creating a philosophical understanding, freeing myself from family indoctrination and conservatism of the South, studies in philosophy and wisdom systems inform my work. I created jobs and grants for artists to collaborate with communities to solve real world problems through art projects, and following my action painting and gestural drawings related to duende created SF Flamenco web magazine, while maintaining a studio practice. An individual artist grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation gave me the means to acquire the tools to create large scale photographic prints, the scale of the abstract artworks I aspired to. Then finally grad school. 2000-2013.
Artwork acquired by the Museum of Photographic Arts 2016
Meta-Landscapes and Visual Ambient Drones, a series of abstract film photographs of the Sun, sea and landscapes of the Northern California coast, were invited to and featured in the triennial group exhibition Boundless, and the Sun Never Sets, 3 was inducted into the museum’s permanent collection. Museum of Photographic Arts at the San Diego Museum of Modern Art.
Fields of the Sun, 167 Icarus Survives. 2019
Abstraction done In camera, was the end to the challenge of photography and its traditional notions of objective views of the world, as seen in the projects House of Perception to Meta Landscapes. Sun Mountain Wild Vision an art book of 2017 shows through narrative the key. The experience of the world may be subjective but there remain grand narratives, such as, the Sun.
Abstracting film photography, the Sun and landscapes. Previously represented by Kopeikin Gallery Los Angeles, AGAG Sausalito and IdeelArt London.
Icarus Survives. 2019 Book.
“Yes, I flew high but it did not melt the wax. It gets colder when you go higher. It was my escape.” Retelling the myth of Icarus, a visual narrative of abstract film photography and prose, the finale in the book series Wild Vision. Photographing the Sun is an Ouroboros.
Ouroboros Suns, Joshua Tree, Transcendental Road 2023
Shifting the perspectives of our world, or exterior world, had been honed to a craft, and it found its true North, the Sun, the source of our light. It was now the interior world, expressed through painting, as it meshes with the exterior that became the focus of Transcendental Road.
Previously represented by AGAG Sausalito and IdeelArt London.
Asphalt Abstracted Ad Astra 2023
France provided an artist residency where I could focus on developing the painting aspect in Transcendental Road. A return to painting, the printed photographic image of the road lines, homage from my mother’s resting place, was a consistent element in the next series, paintings of
Asphalt Abstracted Ad Astra. Acrylic and photographic print on canvas 32” x 40”. Previously represented by IdeelArt London.
Ouroboros Sun (the Quiet Stars 013) 2025
Acrylic on canvas 40” x 50”.
The Quiet Stars, paintings created after the departure point into painting of the road photographed, explore similar processes and themes as my early work in action painting and the work of the early thread paintings. Now a calmer color palette primarily of cream canvas, ocean night blue and white hold the play of symbols, a lexicon of lessons and questions explored along the road, studies often pointing to the Sun.
Previously represented by IdeelArt London.
Sun, Feather, Ariadne's Thread (the Quiet Stars 029) 2026
Acrylic paint, thread, photographic print on natural fiber paper, canvas.
The Quiet Stars, new paintings coming soon.