The mouse knows you

He has small mouse names for you…

They talk about you like mice do

And know small mouse things about you…

Like how you fold your underwear and the lint in the corner of your drawer and how your notebooks smell and taste

Yes he can taste your words and your ink and he reads your words and finds comfort in them. He eats them, yes your words are like food to the mouse.

Your pages line his nest, torn to pieces like the dreams you once wrote for only you to see. Now he sleeps his tiny muzzle turned under his paws and tiny claws, dozing....resting breathing, he sighs amongst your words, comforted and dreaming tiny mouse dreams where he runs in tunnels and his dozing limbs run and jerk as he thinks of running in his dreams….

The Cowboy Way

This is my third year doing solo motorcycle adventure touring. The destination my past 2 years has been Burning Man in Black Rock Desert, Nevada. about 2200 miles coming and going, a little over 2 days each way. Less and less carried each year, you would have thought I was preparing for a nuclear disaster the first year and in fact that's where I went the first year, Trinity, New Mexico. I began the first year by shaking off the sleep by walking around gas stations and truck stops aimlessly. This year I slumped against the wall of all night McDonald's, wrapped myself in a Massai blanket and slept damn near under my bike or lay next to it, my electric jacket plugged into an accessory port.
In the middle of a field in the middle of a night, my helmet still on, the stars twinkling o'er my head on a cool summer night I finally felt myself approaching the Cowboy Way of life. Sleeping on the open range, alone and in wonder. Wondering if someone would come up and hack my arms and legs off and throw a sack of lime on me. Alone and out there, the Cowboy Way which is also the Artist's Way-ALONE, EXPOSED, your work out there intact and beautiful or getting hacked to bits by people with wine glasses in their hands who dramatize all the reasons someone has given them for not doing something themselves. Anyway you cut it it's great-the wind, the ride, the people who come up and meet you, the other loners you come across, the people who help you, the people you help, the lady you give a dollar to in Kayenta who is working the people who pass her by for money to buy an ice cream at the McDonald's when you know the ice cream machine is broken. The same lady who tells you about her life, her husband and daughter and son and you realize this could be your mother too, her beautiful skin wrinkled by the desert sun and her Navajo lineage. People get all uptight about their handout bucks--ooh don't give a panhandler money it encourages them not to work or teaches them to be a freeloader but the same person overpays for a whimshit chai latte they could have made at home for 2 dollars less and they get no improvement in their history lesson by exchange, they get no beauty, no brown eye shining at them, no wizened look cast a glance over the dry red desert and it all right there before them like a gift found in the dust of the playa lake bed all crusty looking like a St Anthony medal till you take it home and wash the dust off to find a belly dancer your wife can question you about....

Productivity and Creativity

Today someone came into my office asking why I do all the things I do-most people are content with home and their family life. To this I replied that everybody has other things they would like to do they just let someone else do their thinking for them, i.e. :

What do you want to do that for?
No one around here does stuff like that?
Oh I don't know how to do that?
Stupid-you're too stupid!
Don't ask any questions?
I don't know how to do that.
What good is it?
Why bother?
No one can ever change that?
Those people have been at it for a thousand years...

It's pretty hard to go through life without going into agreement with something, I guess why marketing exists but when it comes to out talent and creativity you have to be vigilant and on the prowl for suppressive thought, if you agree with it you will allow it.

Union County Hospital Commission

Recently completed work :
This version is more Rubensque in nature and freeflowing. Swooping someone up to safety reminds me of my life with my daughters.

The Rescuer

Thin Blue Line

Have been doing lots of work on this lately and viewpoints are beginning to shift or maybe not. Previously I spent time on the control element and now am seeing a tangent of this which is not talking about it as a result of embarassment and fear and how much that traps a person. I guess giving up your ability to communicate is a loss of control as well. Entrapment can be physical, threat of loss of environment, children, belongings and status.

Say My Name

Just finished an installation piece, called SAY MY NAME. Really incredible in so many ways.

I guess I've found my niche in that I really really love creating installation pieces. The process is both a response to a personal environmental issue and a dialogue with a viewer during the exposure to the piece and after the fact as well with me and in the internal world of the viewer. This one resulted in an uncomfortable feeling for many as it raised issues we'd all rather not talk about any more which can lay the foundation for more of the same.

The inception of this piece began to some degree during my daughter's miscarriage experience. There we were, my daughter, son-in-law and myself, in the hospital trying to assimilate and deal with a very very trying experience and not lose it. I had to remember everything. Through the whole thing we all felt that there was a no name issue. No one would say baby, or embryo or fetus or child or her or him not even it hardly. There was this amorphous, unmouthed word almost a preconcept that could form no word or thought. Even after the baby was extracted and put in a steel dish a nurse whisked it away from me as I approached to look so it can be removed to nonexistence, a tissue, a specimen to be disposed and unheard of. It was then I knew that I would come back and address this in my art.

A few weeks later I was hosting a local cable television show called ASK YOUR DOCTOR which can be viewed at askyourdoctor.tv. After we signed off the air the doctor/friend I had interviewed asked me if I noticed anything interesting about the anatomy book he had used for demonstrative purposes during the show and I shrugged and noted that the drawings were pretty good. He nodded and told me it was a banned book and was written by a known and avowed Nazi and that it had been in circulation in the States even in the 90's. I was taken back a bit and weeks later felt a bit haunted by that book and him. Here was the son of a Methodist minister, very involved with his church and with christian matters carting this book of dissected Holocaust victims and using them to explain things to unsuspecting people.

It was here that I saw some similarities in that these victims who once had names, families, lives, favorite shoes had been reduced to an image with no name no hint of the being that once inhabited that body. The breeding ground for what is probably only the first in a series of pieces dealing with SAY MY NAME had been formed.