"We are part of the Earth and it is part of us...the Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth...
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.  Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."      

Exerpt from the response of Chief Seattle to a letter from the President of the United States asking to purchase their land. 1852.

Barking Sands Beach  Kauai, Hawaii 2008

Nothing affects me like nature.  Nothing. 

I never knew about my connection with the earth until about fifteen years ago when, badly needing sanity and stability, I stumbled upon it, and I haven't let go of it since.  There is a rhythm, a sort of current that pulls you in the direction you always intended, but I had never heard it so clearly until then.  It was like hearing my heartbeat for the first time, and now my life is structured around that pulse.  That is where art comes in.  

 From the first time I ever heard Joseph Campbell lecture on the nature of symbols and their function in our dreams, language, art and myriad other areas of life, I was hooked.  It was only when I came to the understanding that the opposites that we experience in this life ( i.e. light and dark, good and evil, life and death) are merely representations of different aspects of a 'whole'  existing somewhere, that I began to gain a sort of balance and comfort with nature and my own skin that had been missing since early childhood. 

The resulting realization in my adulthood has been that well-being underlies all existence.  However, awareness of that well-being is often drown out by the noise of life, and in some cases we forget what it looks and sounds like altogether.  When I am painting, I can examine and explore this reality without the confines of culture and its unrelenting dogma, and it opens those places in me that are otherwise inclined to closure and atrophy.  Art is my doorway into the essential, yet unknown aspect of existence and my paintings are many times not what I intended, but a complete and pleasant surprise to me when I step back and realize that it is 'as it should be',  and in much the same way I view life...