I haven’t been painting. For months and months. I feared I might never paint again, truth be told. But my good friend, Kim, saw me through this crisis by giving me the same advice I would naturally give to any of you: even when I’m not painting, I’m painting.

Like the painter, Beatrice Mandelman, the famous Taos Modernist, coming to New Mexico dramatically changed my art. Prior to arriving here my career had been spent as a realist painter, primarily figurative and genre work.

When I first visited Truchas, I was in something of a transition with my work. I was abstracting the backgrounds and [...]

The physical materials that make up these micaceous pieces include, of course, the wood and canvas of my substrate, the plasters I use to create texture. And then, tipping into the miraculous, the grasses from this land on which I live and the precious mica, this “gift of the earth, gift of those who have [...]

I walk on my land across the earth to the shady reaches of the land grant, banked by its wild arroyo, deep and mysterious, until recently unexplored by me. As I wander out there, alone but for my dogs, my eyes invariably fall from the expanse of sky, the sweep of mountains, to the rock [...]

It’s actually hard to say where these paintings begin because they come from such a deep part of me, from a connection with and respect for this land, from the life I’ve been exploring since coming here. I am different because of this place. Perhaps the paintings begin there—in that difference. But, at least on [...]

As most of you know I’ve begun a new series of paintings I’m calling The Micaceous Series. A reader of the blog, Grace Kane, calls them my earth paintings and she is so right. I am making them with earth and straw, the recipe for adobe. The longer I live here on this land, the [...]

A new series is being born, right now, this minute, and its genesis is very interesting, I think. It springs from the roots of my early work as an abstract painter, my current day work, mixed together with the life I’m living on this land, and my profound connection to it.

Bill and Margaret Franke, the [...]

From the very beginning, whenever man has found a moment he doesn’t have to devote to survival, he looks around, gauges the distance, assesses the world, does this against himself, against his temporal weakness.

At first, those moments must have been fairly direct, profoundly simple, reactions to silence, to budding beauty. He must have felt a [...]

Why is art important? As I’ve pondered this question, I’ve realized there is no way I can depersonalize my answer. I honestly can’t say why art is important to another but I can express my experience. I would love to get your thoughts on the subject and, as with the earlier question about what art [...]