COLLECTIONS
The University of Texas School of Law, Austin, TX.
Houston's Restaurant, Austin, TX.
Becky Beaver
Luci Baines Johnson

Statement of Artistic Concerns

Besides being born with a gypsy soul and an intimate connection with nature, I was raised in a family of storytellers who considered travel to be a valuable part of a person's education. Thus from a young age I was exposed to other places and other cultures. The love of travel and global exploration has stayed with me, having become a part of my work. Painting is a journalistic response to life for me, and I set out to tell stories of different landscapes--of living things in those landscapes, of the feelings spots of time in those landscapes elicit--in the form of 'visual poems' or 'odes' to the natural world. And although my work is not blatantly political, it is the result of a sustained observation of the natural environment, a place whose beauty and value is threatened by our increasingly urban and industrialized culture. I feel tremendous compassion and awe when I look at that world and those feelings inevitably enter as subjects of my paintings. Therefore, I hope a viewer of my work experiences a more intimate connection with the natural world and that by personalizing this connection, they may experience the world at large in a more sensitive and thoughtful way.

I strive to create visual counterparts--at times abstract, at times figurative and representational--to the geography, ecology and atmosphere of the places I paint, and to explore and reveal the spiritual landscape that exists within the physical landscape.

I am inspired by gardens, my garden, deep woods, dusk, Japanese prints, calligraphy, cracks in roads and sidewalks, shadows, arching lines in space, bare branches against winter sky, sounds of wind, moments with flowers, poetry, music, fabrics and textiles, color and light, horizons, mystery of emotion, and beauty.

My studio practice involves searching and observing, waiting and receiving, and allowing intuition and chance to take part in the process by which a work comes to fruition. My process involves first absorbing the essence of a place, of a moment, of a living thing; and then allowing whatever I've received to distill its way down and re-emerge as visual imagery. The nature of the support determines the mark making, as I am interested in letting the media and the composition play off the material on which they are applied.

Emil Nolde, a German Expressionist painter who, when asked his intentions, replied: "To grasp what lies at the very heart and to transform Nature by infusing it with one's own mind and spirit."

All the Hemispheres

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.

Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.

Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You

By HAFIZ, 14th century Persia
Translated by Daniel Ladinsky