My Ancestors Blood & Bones. Become my Paintings…

I paint light. Not light as subject, but light as inheritance.

My brush yearns to paint the skies, land, and horizons of Northern New Mexico. I've been chasing a visceral feeling I could never before name. Yet recently, I learned my great-great-grandmother, Cornelia, was born here in 1850, before she traversed the Old Santa Fe Trail to Missouri. The light that feeds my work was inherited within my blood and bones.

I was raised on that very ground: chasing fireflies, wading barefoot in current-driven rivers, riding bareback through booming thunderstorms. Did Cornelia cherish these same things, in Taos and Independence?

My new, abstracted body of works ponder my ancestor's journey topographically, in abstracted line, from an aerial view: the boulders, the passages, the treacherous paths she must have crossed, my own journey laid over hers.

I paint on clay board with coffee, the way settlers and travelers coveted that first boiling cup brewed from a single precious bean. At times I painted with my own blood from an accidental cut; a material as raw and ancestral as the land itself.

I've built a private iconography to imagine her experience. A black amorphous form, a raven overhead. A turquoise stroke, a river crossed. A graphite gestural strike, a moment someone was lost. A red slice, a gunshot on the trail. A metallic ink representing a prayer unanswered...

These paintings trace our blood, bones, and the landscapes that live within each of us, even before we know when, or where, we've arrived.