EARTH PAINTING - DESCRIPTION

I search for my earth colors, studying the landscape and getting to know a place before I dig (always with permission). A southwestern road- or trailside can furnish a glorious batch of natural pigment: gold, green, blue, orange, brown, silver, black, red, pink. I collect dirt, mud, sand, and rock that I crush and mix. Then when wind and weather are right, and I’ve found the right patch of ground for laying out unprimed unstretched canvas, I’m bent over for about two hours applying color and texture with my hands or weeds, branches, or brush. The piece may then take up to three or four hours to dry enough-to a consistency like a tanned hide-before I can move it. A completed work can suggest, simultaneously, huge forms seen from long distances or small things much magnified. My earth paintings are celebrations of nature: river beds or mountain ranges seen from ten miles up, a canyon’s geology, the anatomy of a trout jaw, an amoeba extending a pseudopod, the diagram of a molecule. They provoke reflection and evoke responses to a place and deep healing. They are spiritually expansive and healing; both in the making and the viewing.

EARTH PAINTINGS - PHOTO-ESSAY, "HOW I DO IT"