The creation of artwork is the creation of a wormhole – one...
Read more »

My Baltics body of work has become a big nest, with many eggs. Here is one from the “warbirds” egg – a companion piece to last month’s carrier pigeon picture. Last time it was a Purim picture, and this one is for the Vernal Equinox. This image is a sketch for a seriograph I’m planning...
Read more »

When at sea, I like to station myself at the prow.  I like the way the word sounds, with all the shaping required by the lips. Not all words require such effort to utter, and this one also enjoys a bit of propulsion. It’s a word that sounds like what it is: moving through...
Read more »

Here is a meditation piece for shabbat. This carrier pigeon brings its HAPPY PURIM message to you one day early! It has travelled from a 20th century, war-torn Purim, on a day when the Allies were dropping carrier pigeons into France in an attempt to communicate with the struggling resistance movement. This is a Nazi...
Read more »

The Pinacates is one of the most ferociously beautiful places on Earth – it is within the lands of the Tohono O’odham tribe.  It’s part of the gorgeous Sonoran Desert, just south of what is currently the Arizona-Mexico border but for thousands of years before colonialism were the open lands of the Papago or...
Read more »

I wonder what migratory birds think of Los Angeles. Perhaps they felt as I did in the Muslim villages of North Africa, where I spent days without seeing another woman. Today I witnessed the fleeting migration of miniature birds the color of egg yolks and mandarin oranges. Some alteration in the angle of the...
Read more »

German artist Paetrick Schmidt created this phenomenal  collage painting and sent it my way in response and conversation with last week’s Edisto Bottle Tree essay…a long tirade comparing antebellum-era plantations to Nazi-era concentration camps, and requesting the United States follow Germany’s lead: recognize the human rights atrocities that happened there, protect them as national...
Read more »

A family legend tells that in the late 1700s, an ancestor was scalped by the Catawba and Edisto tribes on Edisto Island, South Carolina, along the shores of the Edisto Creek.  This branch of the family had recently fled a village in County Antrim right before that town’s most notorious series of witch trials...
Read more »

Getting struck by lightning last week over the ocean – and in a 757 – gave me an unexpected but perhaps not perversely unwelcome glimpse into the cosmic beauty of death by simultanous drowning and burning. This came at an odd juncture. I am looking for more confidence in the human species these days....
Read more »

One of the first mornings in my glorious new studio downtown, and what happiness – I discovered a long-lost yet lovely pair of reading spectacles deep within an ancient and disintegrating hand-painted pasteboard doll’s trunk someone salvaged from a barn in far eastern Tennessee. It’s rather an intriguing contraption, that Appalachian trunk.  Many peculiar...
Read more »

THE NEW NEST, BEFORE FULL FEATHERING For the past month, the blog – like any good egg – has been experiencing a cozy winter’s incubation while I’ve been feathering the new nest –  moving my art studio from “the cottage” in Culver City to a wee aerie above downtown LA’s gallery row area. The...
Read more »

Stalking hedgerows – like a fox, I’ve been skirting fields, stalking stalks of corn, looking for trespassing signs, hunting signs, signs of life, secrets of history within the wires. The hedgerow is a lovely spot.  The intergenerational swap meet of cultivated land:  rusted horseshoes, broken tillers, jawbone of a horse, mock oranges, arrowheads, abandoned...
Read more »