Conclave (The Defile) Painting

I make art that connects. Art that connects us to place. To shared heritage. To our bodies, to our present moment, and to our practices of contemplation and community. My work is centered in creative practice--an extension of contemplative practice. I draw inspiration from a big well: from the land, from relationships in community, and from the increasingly connected international world of post-minimalist, process-oriented painting. I think of myself as a kind of activist--a soul worker, let’s say. Vision is my job. As artists, it’s our job to gestate new vision, birth it, and nurture it, introducing it to our communities and letting it change into the needful thing, over and over again. I take this on because I believe we need new vision--that we always do, in fact. I take this on as the best thing I am fitted to, the most frighteningly wonderful thing I can imagine, the best use of my impermanent life. We’re remodelling our understanding of our relationships to ourselves, to our communities, to our global culture, and to the earth itself. We’re retrofitting our culture, because retrofitting is the least violent, the least wasteful, and the most living way to approach the redesign of the human structures we live within. I'm a New Englander living in New Mexico. Grew up stretched between Boston Brahmins and the New Hampshire woods. Studies in philosophy and psychology, especially yoga and meditation, from late adolescence. Studied, choreographed and performed Butoh, contact improvisation, and other forms of postmodern dance. Embodiment and presence form the cornerstones of my creative practice.