acryla-gouache on hot pressed paper
12 x 9 inches, 2022
Private collection
acryla-gouache on hot press paper
12 x 9 inches, 2021
This misty, tree-lined lake is comprised of pieces of real places but is not itself a real place. This being/not being is a metaphor: this painting came from a need to process grief with my body. I painted without a plan and with an unusual sense of urgency. In memory of Julie Green.
gouache on hot press paper
24 x 18 inches, 2020
Private collection
Flashe on translucent Yupo
7 x 5 inches (painted recto and verso)
2021
Private collection
I rarely indulge in re-painting, but I wanted to see what the desert scenery would look like behind a hazy scrim, a visual metaphor for the effect of nostalgia on remembered places. The landscape areas are reverse-painted on the backside of the translucent substrate; the sharp architecture is rendered on the front. This one shifts the focus from what's outside and behind to the interior.
graphite and matte vinyl paint on translucent polypropylene
(painted recto and verso)
7 x 5 inches
2021
Private collection
Poison hemlock, the flowering plant drawn around the folded polygon, is easily mistaken by the unwary for Queen Anne’s Lace (a favorite when I was a child). Hemlock, meanwhile, is said to have received the purplish stains on its stems from the spilling of blood and was used to kill people convicted of sedition and treachery in Ancient Greece (most famously, Socrates). It is also used, in careful quantities, in folk medicines and witches’ brews. Every part of the plant is poisonous, so it must be handled with care.
matte vinyl paint on translucent polypropylene
(painted recto and verso)
7 x 5 inches
2021
Private collection
gouache on hot press paper
24 x 18 inches, 2020
photo by Mario Gallucci
This painting is about the human tendency to see existing systems as unchangeable, even though history tells us that’s rarely true. That faulty belief is often used as a crutch and a bludgeon to defer responsibility and silence those who seek to address wrongs. The sentiment feels even more significant in the midst of a pandemic and powerful demonstrations confronting the effects of racism in policing.
The plants that appear in the foreground — California fan palm, leafy spurge, Canada thistle, oleander, pampas grass and tree tobacco — are all invasive to the Mojave desert, the landscape of my childhood. I did not know these familiar species were invasive until after I moved to the Pacific Northwest.
acryla-gouache on hot press paper
3 3/8 x 2 1/8 inches
2020
The title for this work comes from a Mark Twain quote about how one tells a story (from A Treasury of American Folklore, like all works in this series), but it brings to mind bigger questions about representation. Who gets to say what stories “ought” to be told, how they are told, who they reach? The great Toni Morrison said, “What was driving me to write was the silence — so many stories untold and unexamined.”
acryla-gouache on hot press paper
3 3/8 x 2 1/8 inches
2020
acryla-gouache on hot press paper
3 3/8 x 2 1/8 inches
2020
A fortune-telling rhyme from A Treasury of American Folklore (1944): "A girl will sometimes make the following remarks to the new moon. I have never heard that the revelation was made to her that she prayed for — at any rate, not by the moon.
“New moon, new moon, pray tell to me
Who my true lover is to be. —
The color of his hair,
The clothes he will wear,
And the day he’ll be wedded to me.”
acryla-gouache on hot press paper
3 3/8 x 2 1/8 inches
2020
This little painting’s title is from a tragic ballad about a miner and the many abuses and dangers of his job. There is a long and pervasive history of cruelty in the service of profit for the already wealthy, from the danger and pollution of coal mines, to the underpaying and lack of care for service workers (so recently and briefly lauded as “essential”), the ongoing use of slave labor in the prison-industrial complex, the stagnation of minimum wage, the use of prior wages to determine future ones (despite egregious income inequity on the basis of unfair bias alone) — on and on.
acryla-gouache on hot press paper
3 3/8 x 2 1/8 inches
2020
“Let me tell you about an incident or two. Maybe that’ll put you in mind of how the wind used to blow…” From “Yarns and Tall Tales, The Wind,” as recorded in A Treasury of American Folklore, 1944 (p. 518).
acryla-gouache on hot press paper
3 3/8 x 2 1/8 inches
2020
I miss the carelessness implied in this title. Simply walking around now requires vigilance, and this state reminds me very much of an earlier time in my life, when I was unsafe and a target wherever I went, even home. I am grateful that there is space and time in my life when constant vigilance is not required, when I feel safe. Some people never get that, and I wish everyone could.
acryla-gouache on hot press paper
3 3/8 x 2 1/8 inches
2020
The title is a line of text from a tale regarding the “Raw-Hide Railroad”, an impractical 12-mile stretch of wooden railroad that once cut its way into Washington. The story relies on racist tropes of Chinook people, which says a lot about who the storyteller and editor considered "American".
Applied to this painting, the title refers to the ever-distant promise of liberty and justice for all, and our collective unwillingness to address how the legacies of settler colonialism and slavery have carried forward, and continue to hamper this "American dream" for each generation (for most, anyway). The painting itself expresses a state of longing and hoping for a better, inclusive future that reckons with this harmful past.
acryla-gouache on hot press paper
3 3/8 x 2 1/8 inches
2020
The title is from a Mark Twain quote on the oral characteristics of humorous story-telling on the American frontier (as copied in A Treasury of American Folklore, 1944). In a book about the influence of Twain and other earlier humorists on contemporary culture, author Silas Kaine Ezell defines “the Great American Joke” as “the incongruity between the rhetoric that promises equality, wealth, and prosperity in American culture and the failure of America to fulfill those promises.”
two-color reduction relief print on Masa
7 x 7 inches (paper), edition of 26 + 4 AP
2019
Created for Rainboeliza’s 2019 Print Exchange (theme: VIVID).
gouache on hot press paper
12 x 9 inches
2019
private collection
gouache on hot press paper
~10 x 10 inches
2019
gouache on hot press paper
7 x 10 inches
2018
private collection
gouache on hot press paper
~10 x 7 inches
2018
private collection
gouache on hot pressed paper
14 x 10 inches
2018
gouache and watercolor on Arches hot pressed paper
10 x 7 inches
2018
private collection
intaglio (etching with aquatint) on Rives BFK
8 x 10 inches (paper)
edition of 17 + 2 AP + 1 TP
2018
Created for the Women, Memory and Psychological Scapes portfolio, SGCI 2018.
gouache on hot pressed cotton paper
7 x 5 inches
2017
private collection
gouache on hot pressed cotton paper
7 x 5 inches
2017
private collection
gouache on hot-pressed paper
10.25 x 14.125 inches
2017
gouache on Arches hot pressed paper
10 x 7 inches
2017
gouache on hot-pressed paper
7 x 10 inches
2016
gouache on hot-pressed paper
10.25 x 14.125 inches
2016
title page
intaglio and letterpress on paper, leather, brass
12 x 12 x .5 inches (closed)
2014-15