I really don’t have any titles for any of my paintings. I don’t think of them in that way. Nor do they really have any meanings beyond being a record for me of whatever I was going through in my life at that moment. They are how I retain memories of life, the daily and the important days. In this way, they are an autobiography. An impenetrable record of a life, given in random and sometimes contradictory order. A title is only a note, and in the way I use it here, because the titles of my work change depending on the medium of presentation and rootedness of memory and irascible trickster with a bit of demon, the way I use it here, on this site, is to give an implied narrative structure based on a limited amount of information. The title may have no relationship to the image other than as an internal mechanism of placing the work in my own sense of time and a record of my life.

Foraged organic materials including bees and a crow feather, charcoal, and lacquer on canvas with recycled wood, gold leaf, and muslin frame. This is from mid-July 2019. When I create these constructions out of found materials, the underlying purpose for me is to seek a creative outlet in the production of an image which does not use a brushstroke as the foundational component of creation, the most basic tool. The creator, the tool, and the creation. My painting style of improvised, non linear, non objective, as much a record of process as an image, composed entirely of interlocking brushstrokes, often creating a wormlike field of color, is an exhausting style to produce work in. I can go years between producing them, and like love and hell, they come in spurts. I wanted a work in which don’t paint anything, it is compiled, at best, of materials organized against fields of different colors. But eventually, the different styles end up being integrated with each other over time. But I always get back to those things, which I see as my unique gift. So I started creating these things with flowers and stuff I gather. I use glue and clear lacquers to assemble the image. This one is created where I mix in other themes from work contemporary to this one, the usage of charcoal drawing directly on canvas. The title is because I was reading Thus Spake Zarathustra. Not for any particular reason. I have an old printing I’ve owned for 35 years at least. I bought it at a bookstore in San Antonio in 1986. A used bookstore in an old house part of town by the fancy colleges and nice park. A real San Antonio bohemian kind of place. I have a fear of crows. I’ve been dive bombed by them a couple of times over 25 years, so they make me skittish. This came to me in a dream, its basically how I sketched it out that night. Except it is created over a period of time, and the materials collected have within them, enclosed, a material record of things from the few months it takes to make one of these from start to finish. When I say mid-July, that is when it was started. I don’t remember much of the dream. I know that in that moment, waking up with a memory and insight exactly how to create an image, my main need is to record as quickly as possible as much of the final visual work, as it comes to me in a finished state. My creative process is then, through improvisation of composition, to approach the same sense of image in my dreams. It is in a threshold of balance that I sense completeness in my own work.

Acrylic and Oil on Wood, 8 pointed 2 sided star representing Jupiter and the story of how Star Boy brought the Sun Dance to the People. In the cultural heritage I was given through my mother, that of Plains Indians and Michif people in North Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, it is the Sun Dance whose motions and rhythms I have always felt a deeper connection to, when I was younger. These days, I am energized more by Grass Dance songs and rhythms. I am not sure if this an aspect of aging, or just my aging. When I would hear my Grandpa singing, as a kid, he died when I was 12 or 13, it sounds like the Grass Dance songs. So, I think I want to recapture in some way that connection to my Grandpa moreso than a wider cultural connection like there would be on a Reservation. This is one aspect of the urban, distributed, displaced Indian experience, going from being able to claim a right to the legal term Indian, to being Native, to Indigenous. By that, I mean the connection to treaty rights my ancestors earned in settling a war with the United States of America. If you are reading this and youi are an American, these are your treaty rights as well. I do not have them in the absence of your connection to the same treaties, broken treaties. So this is a 2 sided medicine wheel, intended to create a protective space for me when I am feeling vulnerable. It is medicine from my ancestors, harnessed through my creative gifts, my gift from my mother, from her father, from his mother, from her mother and father. I know it seems like a lot, but it is all in the piece. The different sides of the wheel are variations on each other. Like a lot of my work, the brushstrokes are the writing, a language obscure by its creation, immediately becoming a mystery if thought of as a narrative.

Foraged organic materials, lacquer, soy ink, acrylic, oil on wood and canvas. These were made between Winter and Summer 2019. Each is 24 inches by 24 inches. Each one was made with materials gathered fresh while the work was being created. They have encased within clear lacquers, organic material from that living moment. These age and decay over time, and thus the memory of their creation, and for me the memory of that time the works store within their composition, will decay, fracture, dissipate. In that aging mirror, the work changes with me. The memories related to their creation fades. Ley Lines. I use this in a lot of my work, in paintings, in songs, in poems. Direct lines between two things sensed. Is it an energy one is just coming across? Is it from oneself? As a conscious thought it is self-contained, as well as the choice to interpret the information as having a source with some implied meaning. It might just be static electricity. But, as it happens, my purpose in life is not to be very good at all at being objective to electric shock, and prone to romantic delusions in its wake even, but rather to be not inspired, but ridden with stress and anxiety and only able to rid myself of it with creating something. They don’t exist. What does? Love comes from nowhere, from nothing. It was not there, and then it was. It did not exist, and then it did. It is the precursor to the work, which also did not exist, and then it did. Before that, and before that, and before that, was anxiety, panic, fear, loathing, joy, calm, confusion, and tenderness. And in the end was a kind of awareness, insight, learning, helped with a breakdown into more basic units. I don’t know. I don’t know how it works, but I know there are rare things, and that whatever I think is going on is likely some sort of fabrication as much as interpretation, but that it is still rare, and it will not really inspire, but rather release. In that way the creative process producing the release creates space for new knowledge and the opportunity to grow from this knowledge. That’s the healing. Within the building of the work, the capturing of the materials in their clear plastic shells, is a shedding. It has a smell. It is some kind of dog.

Foraged organic materials, acrylic, lacquer, glue, and spray paint on basswood

Oil and acrylic on paper mounted on recycled garage door panel mounted on basswood backing and frame. I painted this in 1993. All of my smaller pieces at that time were studies for larger pieces. This is a takeoff on Rauschenberg’s Erased DeKooning. There was an interview of DeKooning in Interview, so I cut out his picture and painted it.

Oil and Acrylic on Recycled Wooden Garage Door Panel mounted on basswood backing and frame

Soy based ink and pottery varnish on canvas

Self portrait with my cat Eliot, companion piece to Leslie and Jig

Charcoal and lacquer on Canvas

Acrylic and soy based ink with lacquer on wood

Charcoal on Canvas

Oil on Paper

Oil, acrylic, soy based ink, and lacquer on wood

Oil on Canvas, 1991 with Swans Christ Gravity in background. Erika was a study done in preparation for the larger piece behind it. This picture is in my last apartment I had in Kent, Washington before quitting my job and moving into a an abandoned warehouse space. I rented the upper floor of an old baker warehouse with an ice cream business in it. I had to use a chain elevator to pull myself up to the upper floor. It was 2,000 square feet for $100 a month. Cold water, no heat.

Oil, acrylic, charcoal and lacquer on canvas

35mm film, hand manipulated negative printed by Kodak

Acrylic on Canvas

Acrylic and Oil on Canvas

Flowers from my garden along with materials gathered on a 2 week road trip to North Dakota. Materials gathered from Rocky Boys Reservation in Montana, and the Turtle Mountain and Spirit Lake Reservations in North Dakota. Fixed using superglue and lacquer. Bass wood with walnut oil stain.

Soy based ink, foraged organic material, lacquer, wood

Handmade book for Leslie

Soy based ink, foraged organic material, found object, wood

Handmake Book in Edition of 2

Acrylic, ink, oil pen and printer ink on recycled blank comic cover, printer paper with printed images and text, picture wire, and nylon thread.

Poetry format for this book was one poem a day, written over a month, with a corresponding 15” x 30” Charcoal on Canvas painting. The poems were then presented in reverse chronological order. Although mostly adhered to, the actual date range of the poems is December 12, 2018 to March 7, 2019. The images were created between January 23, 2019 and March 7, 2019. There were two variations from the image format, a 16” x 20” and a 24” x 30”, both in color. 27 images total, 28 poems in total.

Oil on Paper

Painted the weekend after Kurt Cobain died.

We walked home that Saturday night after having pizza and broke-up.

1991, Oil on Canvas, 48” x 96”

In progress photo. I don’t remember what happened to this painting. Like Erika it is lost. The central Christ image: I was studying poetry and biblical literature. My favorite book was The Pursuit of the Millenium by Norman Cohn and the others were The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, and The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis, and each informed the composition. I was heavily into ‘deeply composing’ my works at that time and would spend months studying multiple ideas to surrealistically or cut-up into the final composed piece. I was heavily into gnosticism and study of Crowley’s magick and tarot cards. The Christ experiences its own division at a cellular level. The swans idea is born of Yeat’s The Wild Swans at Coole. The other side of Christ is two faces intertwined in a kiss, that is the ‘gravity’. That particular image was drawn heavily from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Acrylic on Canvas

Oil on Linen

Acrylic, soy based ink, foraged organic materials, lacquer, wood

A book for my children

A book for Leslie

Wood, acrylic, foraged organic material, burned leaves, lacquer

Digital painting

Digital painting

Digital painting

Digital photograph

Digital painting

In the woods with Leslie

Oil and acrylic on canvas

Acrylic, lacquer, and foraged organic materials on Canvas. The 125th and final painting of 2019. I may do more in this series, but this now completes this particular series.

Digital painting

Digital painting

In the woods with Leslie

Oil and acrylic on canvas

Acrylic on Canvas

Digital painting

Digital painting

Digital painting

Digital painting

Acrylic on Canvas

Digital Photograph

Burned leaves, soy based ink, acrylic, and lacquer on canvas

Acrylic on Canvas

Burned leaves, soy based ink, acrylic, and lacquer on canvas

Acrylic on Canvas with rubber animals

Oil, Ink, Acrylic on Canvas

Acrylic on Wood

Digital Painting

Acrylic and Gesso and foraged bee on canvas

Glow in the dark paint, wood, lacquer, foraged organic material

Oil, acrylic, soy based ink, and lacquer on canvas and wood

Acrylic, foraged organic material gathered in the states of Washington and North Dakota, glue, and lacquer on canvas with mounted wooden frame and enamel

Glow in the dark paint, soy based ink, acrylic, foraged insects, and lacquer on wood

Soy based ink, burned leaves and foraged organic materials, acrylic, and lacquer on wood

Dragons Blood Resin and acrylic on wood

Oil on paper

Oil and acrylic on canvas

Oil and acrylic on canvas

Acrylic on Canvas

Six pieces covering works produced from November 2018 to January 2019

Acrylic, Oil, and Lacquer on Canvas

Charcoal and lacquer on canvas

Charcoal on Canvas

Charcoal and Lacquer on Canvas

Charcoal and Lacquer on Canvas

Charcoal and Lacquer on Canvas

Charcoal on Canvas

Charcoal and lacquer on Canvas

Charcoal and lacquer on Canvas

Charcoal and lacquer on Canvas

Charcoal and lacquer on Canvas

Acrylic, soy based ink, lacquer and foraged organic material on wood

Acrylic on Wood

Unfinished painting abandoned because it looks like it has a penis in it. Charcoal, foraged organic material, and lacquer on canvas.

Hand made object of preframed artist’s canvas, glow in the dark paint, foraged organic materials, glue, lacquer, ink, and acrylic

Acrylic on Canvas

Acrylic on Canvas

Acrylic on Wood

Acrylic on Canvas

Oil on Paper

Flag: Acrylic on Wood

Ghost (Starsha): Mixed Media on Wood

Oil on Paper

Oil on Paper

Oil on Paper

Oil on Paper

Soy based ink, lacquer, and foraged organic material on canvas

Acrylic on Canvas

Acrylic on Canvas

Acrylic on Canvas

Acrylic on Wood

Screen printed by hand in a limited edition. Most of the posters would have been stapled up on walls and poles in my neighborhood of Capital Hill in Seattle. I lived at Pike and Harvard Street and would plaster these imaginary band flyers in and amongst real flyers.

soy ink and lacquers on canvas