Sierra Stories + Land[back]scapes

In 2022, the summer after my mom passed, I started spending a lot of time in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. My girlfriend at the time, local to the foothills there, was healing through a grievous injury and needed my help, so I spent hours and months and days driving back and forth across the state. I was totally buried with the sorting-through, cleaning, legal, construction work and other associated tasks dealing with the death of a parent, as well as keeping my design business afloat, and I would work really really hard for two weeks or a month, and then retreat to the mountain to snuggle and cry and make food and go hiking in the forest and go to the river and raise a puppy. Something about the mountains offered real comfort. I think a big part was that they reminded me of happy memories from childhood of camping and fishing and being together as a big family unit, my ma and her sisters and all our cousins together.

When I found a studio space up there the following year, and had basically wrapped-up all the death-work, I decided to move-in and give myself a winter to make paintings and cry and go on the mountain and think about where I came from, who I am, and where I might be going. I brought the design jobs I had open at the time with me from the Coast and chipped away at them in that big old drafty classroom in the beautiful old Art Deco Community Center building that was built in the Depression as part of the Works Progress Administration, and painted.

The painting became a ritual of grief and praise, healing, honoring, remembrance, and gratitude. They are about the joy in the landscape, in color, in movement, and in being alive. The Mother's gift to us all.

My mother was a Native American, her father was a Chickasaw from Oklahoma who had migrated to California during the Depression, and she put that identity and history in physical form with an alter in the middle of her little house. So, I have always thought of myself as part Indian. I continued to develop the visual concepts in the Coast Ranges series, juxtaposing California landscapes with indigenous pattern-work and other formal quotations from the cultures that have inhabited these lands through the centuries, as a way of furthering the conversation around syncretism, colonialism, globalisation, migration and spiritual belonging.