Golden State, Coast Ranges Series
2019-22
These works are about the mythology written on the land; the interaction of memory, history, myth with land and sun, mountain and valley, water and humans. There is both loneliness and grandeur in the vast open spaces out here on of the very edge of the West, my Golden State, the land of dreams...
It is, all at once, a place, a story, a stage, a state of mind, a myth, a dream, a geography of the mind...
My home. My Native State.
I have been riding and driving in cars on her highways, or walking, through her mountains and hills and plains and deserts and along her beaches since as long as I can remember.
In the ocean. (Chattering, obseesed with feeling that power, finding it in myself...the endlessness...)
This land has always felt vast and empty and, at the same time, crowded with people and their spirits...so many stories on the wind, giving me a sense of being possessed by her, and never, ever, quite under-standing what we’re all doing here...
There is something aggressive in the grandeur of this place, a certain violence and abandonment in the beauty of uplifted and broken ranges that march jaggedly into the sea, or wide limitless pine forests, or the over-grazed windswept, voluptuous hills that speak of Spanish conquests, a disrupted Eden, ancient legacies entwined...
In the flux of the last decades of wanderings and art adventures, I’ve meditated deeply on the dreams of this land, and it's people(s)...they are frenzied, acquisitive dreams, California dreams. Wave after wave of people risking everything for the acquisition of gold, glory, souls, slaves, fame, land, love, enlightenment....
