I have always been part of the wild, feeling more at home in the back country than anywhere else I have traveled and lived. I grew up with a backpack as my home during the summers in Northern California where the Trinity and Marble Mountain ranges were my backyard.
My military duty took me to the East Coast where I backpacked the Appalachians and Smokey Mountains. These ranges, though very different than the steep rocky peaks of home are stunning. I discovered remnants of long abandoned homesteads marked by a stone chimney rising up from a field of daffodils or old foundations outlining where lives began and ended. The Native Americans and their ancestors left pictographs and petroglyphs throughout this continent telling those who followed that they were here, have always been here. I eventually had the opportunity to travel abroad and these are the years that would fire up my own desire to create. My time in Europe introduced me to medieval architecture that still defy time. Different cultures on the same continent expressing itself through art, rituals, celebrations. I was fortunate to venture into the caves in the Pyrenees Mountains that separate Spain and France. There, deep in the earth are extraordinary paintings of all the animals that roamed the surface 35,000 years ago and that were vital to the survival of these primitive people. They created these images by daring to venture into the unknown with a variety of pigments from found minerals and a small fat filled bowl that burned for light. Many of these images are large, in difficult locations and the darkness and silence are incomprehensible. Yet they remained for long periods of time painting bison, horses, aurochs, red deer and so much more. They would return time and time again. My travels to Central and South America introduced me to a very different ancient culture. The pyramids and temples are an obvious architectural theme for peoples throughout the world, but Mesoamerican art seemed to me to be more brutal, passionate and yet beautiful within its cultural context. These cultures were also compelled to express their beliefs and build sense of unity through their art.
New archeological discoveries substantiate this deep unquestionable, unrelenting drive to create. No matter the time or place in the history of humans, we were and still are compelled to speak a visual language, one that any human from any culture could, on some level, relate to and even understand the intended meaning or acquire meaning that is unique to the viewer. Art is a language that bridges time and cultures.
I have been living and creating for several decades now in a small house tucked away in the wilderness of Southern Oregon. My nearest neighbors are the typical and the more elusive inhabitants that also call this home. I am sometimes gifted the sight of a black bear, fox, cougar or occasional bobcat. I attempt to out strategize the ground squirrels, moles and deer for a garden, but so far they win and I am fine with it. My work will no doubt evolve, shift and change, but will always be inspired by the natural world that most revere and have always been a part of. We are loosing that connection much to our own determent. We must remember that we have a sacred duty to protect what remains. Art is the language, the voice that wakes us up.