7/4/2026
I try to write my artist statement for this website, and end up thinking about some other stuff.
I am a poet across many disciplines. At my core, I am most enthusiastic about light, color, and time. Light is energy and love, and color is it's language. Soundwaves and color-waves are two different dialects. Time is an illusion, but we must dream of it collectively to keep harmony together. Story can be told without words. And yet, I am also a wordsmith. Like a typical human being, I try to make sense of what I experience-- to define that which is not understood. In general, greater understanding minimizes suffering, right? Listen, learn, eliminate miscommunication, and we have the keys to diplomacy-- even between factories and atmospheres. There is so much we don't understand in this world, which would benefit from being known. Or perhaps in some situations, it's best to stay unknowable. If you stay hidden, you are safe from the hunters.My most truest discipline is in ritual and is ephemeral. I go out and paint the landscape around me and have a conversation. Painting is a base practice for me. For money, I often paint digitally. I once spent 4+ years working with cinematic lighting. But, the light glows differently in screens than in real life. Removing myself from the screen and being with and in the environment around me proves our basic human connection to the landscape. To call it art for any purpose other than finding and communicating this holy connection, is corrupt. And yet, here I am showing it off on this silly web-page. I suppose I have to have something to show for myself. I didn't get a degree in art from a for-profit university in order to go hungry. Hopefully my showmanship can have a dual purpose of being inspiring. Maybe others, seeing the aesthetics of my experience, will seek it out and model their own ritualistic connections to our environments. Surely, the aesthetics of nature won't just be commodified and exploited for capitalist gain.
Who am I kidding, I am enthusiastic for others to see the same beauty in the world that I witness. While, it's true that I fear an ego in me rising as I share my practice, it's no lie that I take joy in spreading the good news of the gradient on the horizon at dusk. I am passionate about it-- about collecting and show-casing these infinite connections in reality. I glimpse them between flowers and mountains and sea waves and air. In my bones there are scientists wishing to catalog what I am feeling-- this broadness and steadiness. Knowledge of our one-ness and simultaneous individuality. An impossible congruency. I want others to see it, too and to feel it.-- I feel it is important that they do-- I want others to be as moved as I am by the universal love all around us. The scientific method often fails to define god, but this is a different method.
As a child, I once told my mom that when I dance in ballet on stage, I feel like I am telling the world about God. When I played my saxophone out into the fog, dreaming of a kinder future, a young boy came to me and told me that my music would bring many people to god. How amazing to be told that your art would inspire spiritual awakening? How amazing to imagine a holy connection! And, when, on a bad day recently, I sat painting the trees and concrete from the gas-station, recording a snap shot of the current human empire's discordant existence over iced coffee, an old woman asked me if my strange painting was related to my faith. In the past, this religious question might have been shocking to me, I do not go to church. But knowing now what I do from being with the world, I agreed. For, this is my church. It always has been.
As a child, I skipped out on the fire and brimstone, following a deer path into the woods behind the church parking lot. I found my girl scout summer camp back there and felt a reverence, dodging poison ivy and watching rabbits play in long plants and clover dabbled by the sunlit canopy.Who or what is god, but this connection I feel, or do not feel, with sheer existence? It is a connection, not only with the dirt and blossoms, the waves and woods, but also each human and animal around us. Surely, I am not the only one who feels this way about living.
As children, we wanted more than the asphault driveways and getting rides to the target. There was no connection to these elements. My friends and I walked barefoot down the concrete roads and to the walgreens, crossing traffic that worried for the dumb kids in their hoodies and jeans jay walking across the 45mph road. To the drug store our parents drive to, we jostled our goofy energetic bodies to get candy and watch the ducks in the reservoir we couldn't swim in. Where that walgreens was there used to be an old cabin. I would see it on the way to church on sunday mornings as a young kid, and then that patch of woods got all built up with the strip mall and the sushi restaurant.
We'd pass by a ditch in the cornfield on the way to church and I'd see a little wicker picnic basket peaking up over the brush. Every Sunday for years I saw it and I wanted to go and get it and I wondered who had left it there and when, and how long it had been there and how many people came before us and what they were like, and what was inside. Maybe it fell out of a wagon and was lost. People travelled in wagons back then, right? Me and my friends felt like this couldn't be it. There had to be somethign more than the minivans and sedans.
Middle school was by bus for all of us, except once, my classmate ran to class one day because he missed it, and we all thought he was an idiot for doing it, because it took more than an hour from his house and he could have just gotten out of class since his mom and dad were at work. But, he decided to try his own way and make it anyway. I feel like we were all wanting to do that, just a little. I feel like we all had to do that, just a little. I wonder what his ancestors were like for him to make that kind of decision. I remember him, he was so strong-willed and stubborn and he had a deeper voice and longer limbs than the other boys at that age. He must have felt like he could do it: run along the edge of the cornfield that used to be forest, to the schoolyard which used to be cornfield that his great-grandparents farmed. But, he showed up 3rd hour, out of breath, red in the face, gym shoes, gym shorts and a tee-shirt with huge pit stains. He looked worried, like he'd realized his miscalculation too late-- maybe he was 10 minutes in. He must have just decided to keep going. No one was going to come get him if he got too tired. He had to chew what he bit off. He had to have memorized his route from the bus ride. We didn't all have phones back then, and none with maps on them.
Back in our great-grandparents day, they used to get to school like that a lot, I bet. Running everywhere. Walking everywhere. The wagon became the car, and between that there were the trains. A bike, we still have, but shame on you for needing it here, unless it's for sport. I once used a bike to get to a job interview 45 minutes away. I enjoyed the ride, except for the part where I had to navigate some roads with bad visibility and fast cars. Out in the country. They were shocked to see me there. I tried to be as careful as I could. I felt better biking. Everything feels different when you don't travel in a car. You feel more connected to nature around you when you walk or when you're on your bike.
Well, that's not completely true. I've felt connected to nature more than a few times in my car. I don't know what that's about. Sometimes, I've pulled over just to take a photo. It's not the same as being in it, though. Swimming through that air, that fluid of the world which pools around us. In a car, you just don't feel it.
This concrete ain't it.
We walked barefoot on it, have you ever met those weird people who just decide they are going to be barefoot now, like it's their new thing-- they'll just walk everywhere barefoot. And you look at them like they're nuts, like they're just a little off, because they are you know-- that's something that insane people do. Even our ancestors knew to wear shoes. But we have been bitten with a yearning for wildness. With all these constraints we want to start walking around with no shoes on, so we can feel the dirt again. Maybe we need a bit more of that. With all the grass we're not touching, we just want to feel it underfoot all the time now. At least, the crazy people do. Not me though. Nope. I'm normal. When I want to feel part of nature again, I go paint a painting there.
As a kid, it was just a phase. We were growing up and trying to figure out this shitty world around us. We knew who tarzan was, robinhood, peter pan. We all wanted to feel something a bit more real. Something that felt better than what was being given to us. This couldn't be it. Something felt off. And so we walked across the street to the walgreens and bought a hot pink ceiling duster (you know, for cobwebs), I got it just to be a weirdo. We walked around the whole subdivision barefoot, waving this thing around pretending we were casting spells on the country side and summoning rains. We lit a funeral pyre for an anime character and sent the empty box, on fire, out into the reservoir.
How can I communicate this?