An Oakland, California based artist and educator, I earned an MFA at Stanford University in 1998 and have been teaching art at San Francisco University High School since 2014. I'm interested in investigating and visually transcribing the intangible yet palpable experience of my relationship with the natural world through paint, ink, pencil, writing, and installations.
Currently, I am working on a body of work called "Earth Books", an attempt to get out of the way and allow the earth to speak. I am a conduit for stories to emerge where the human being is not the focus. The process involves listening closely to the land, asking permission from a place to collect small amounts of soil and transforming it into clay paint. The non-representational imagery that arrives through the clay paint or in sculptural form is intuitive, a response to as much as a building of relationships with the more than human world.
"Black Inscription" began in 2018 while collaborating on a multi-media rock opera of the same title, with musician, Carla Kihlstedt, where I made pen and ink drawings based on visual information that emerged from mediations related to various rivers and lakes in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
"Transparency of Stones", are paintings on paper or clayboard, from 2018 to 2022 that I began after a kind of lightness of being experience while sitting on a boulder in the Merced River. I felt myself and the granite as molecules, transparent and interchangeable, all vibrating together. Later in 2018 I had a near death experience, a car wreck in Oregon, and began building the series as a way to recover from a long-term concussion.
"Time Cycles" are paintings on paper or clayboard about layers of experience of feeling time cycling in a non-linear way, more of a spiral, that I started during the early days of lockdown in the Spring of 2020. The physical sensory layers consisted of color collections via memory, a focus on breathing, practicing extended proprioception, and visualizing my energetic path through space and time on daily neighborhood walks. A kind of playing with who am I outside cultural identity, outside familial identity; who am I as an animate entity?