if i were a horse what i would dream about

A white harnessed stallion with a blank stare is in a deep sleep dreaming of running free. The raven on his head is the protector of his sacred dream, the one who will always keep it safe in the hopes that one day his dream may come true. The horses running in the background are all collaged in a repetitive fashion much like a human would dream, or at least my dreams happen.

The Saguaro has a very special place in my heart.  Since I have lived in Arizona I have painted or used Saguaros in many of my paintings.  They are a cactus that is only found in the southwestern part of the United States. Rumor has it that it takes 100 years for one to grow to maturity, generally growing their first arm after 100 years.  Afterwards the arms grow quite often. Saguaros are becoming extinct because of predators and surrounding pollution.  They are only propagated through bird  droppings.  Birds feed on the seed from the beautiful white and yellow flowers of the Saguaro. When the flowers are spent they turn a deep brown.  The sun dries them up, but before they dry up they burst open with a beautiful and luscious crimson red fruit containing the seeds of the Saguaro. The bird droppings are the only way that I am aware of that propagates the cactus (see picture of pods below). 

Now the story behind the painting:  The Saguaro is made of scrap booking paper to symbolize the ribs of the cactus.  The buds and blossoms of the cactus are acrylic.  The raven, or crow (which ever you decide it is, is important, and I will explain later), is embossed and patina-ed  on pewter and adhered to the canvas.  He is sitting on the branch of a native tree, the Pale Verde, silhouetted in the middle of the moonlight.  The sky reflects the time of the evening - dark and clear.  the desert and it's hills always have smiles to me and I always portray them as such in my desert painting stories.

I like things to be ambiguous in my work.  The bird can be a Raven or a Crow.  Ravens in some north American Indian cultures are believed to protect the soul and take the soul to heaven after a person dies.  Some believe that when you see a raven around after someone dies, it is the soul of the person who passed, appearing before you to let you know that it is okay.  Then the raven takes the soul of that person to heaven.  They are protectors of your soul. The Crow is a symbol of omens and warnings.  They are meant to be synonymous in this painting.

The Saguaro is humanized and worshiped in this painting.  The light of the moon sheds a holy light onto the cactus flower, the symbol of reproduction of the Saguaro - a continuation of it's existence with hope of eliminating it's extinction.  The raven is it's protector making sure that nothing happens to it.  The crow is the omen and  warning that it could become extinct.  Then back to the Raven who will continue to protect the Saguaro even to its death carrying its memory off to heaven.

If I Were a Saguaro What I Would Dream About personifies a saguaro cactus as a mother. One of beauty, with nettles that are sharp - don’t come to close or she might hurt you. Not intentionally but it is a warning to watch your approach. The blooms are like no other and only hers to show off. The  inner beauty of a saguaro is represented by the wooden, hard core of its internal skeleton seen in the center of the painting. Even when the saguaro dies something of beauty remains left behind  to be remembered. The many cacti in the background are the children to to carry on its legacy. The blue wash represents what feeds the desert, the saguaro,and their home, which sustains them. The hills have smiles, happy places,  happy faces. Purple swirls of paint represent the coming of the monsoon, the haboob that comes before the storm that brings life to the desert family. And of course what is the desert without the mesquite that shades the landscape providing some kind of shelter to others. The raven is seen in the distant glow of the moon. As if it were a protector of one’s dreams and soul, sitting on a rib of the Saguaro skeleton.

This is taken from and actual reality check from my backyard when I lived in Cave Creek, Arizona.  It is one of the few oils I ever completed and took me a few years to complete.  I put it away for awhile then came back into it 5 years later.  I was surprised that I could actually rework the piece.  It is one of my favorites.

On a business trip to Empire, NV, a 4 hour car drive from Reno, Nevada, I came across a pristine and beautiful landscape of golden grass, and purple mountains where the sky was beginning to swell up and storm. Within a short period of time the sky became tornadic swirling up clouds full of dust, with the blue sky seen miles away. The purple mountains were in beautiful contrast to its barren landscape. Through the years many studies have been complete of this landscape; sketches, watercolors, acrylics and this one in particular as an oil painting.

This painting can be viewed in any direction.  The nettles on the cholla cactus took me 4 hours to paint for 3 arms.  It is a very hard painting to photograph because this cactus looks prickly.  However because they are so close together the photograph of the painting makes them look fuzzy.  Similar to how you would see them in the distant landscape. (see close up below).  Hood caps to ornaments with wire woven beads are attached to the canvas to represent cactus flowers.  Nickel metal strips and rice paper are woven into the painting on the right hand side.  The image on the left is an arm of a 30 foot saguaro cactus from my house I lived in in Cave Creek, AZ. This is what it looked like if you were standing below it in the sunlight with the blossom buds  getting ready to open. Colors of the desert are always so brilliant right before the sun sets, which was the intent to portray in this piece.

My Secret Garden was painted at a time when I was trying to learn how to blow glass, which is especially challenging and difficult.  I wanted to learn how to blow tubes that I could string into some of my canvases since I am basically a mixed media artist.  Instead I ended up painting this painting which represents the fire and the heat of the furnace and the beautiful colors of the glass when it is red hot.  The funny thing about the title is that this painting started out as a painting of a flower garden.  My husband always wanted to try to paint so I allowed him to paint on this canvas.  He loved it!  I didn't and continued to change the painting, like all artists do before they decide it is what they want.  He must tell everyone the story when they ask him about the painting reminding me that I covered over his painted area. I kept the title for this reason.

This is a fun and interesting story.  Michael Rhoades, a fellow artist and friend of mine, occupied an art studio close to mine at Hot Shops Art Center in Omaha, NE.  I liked his art and he liked mine.  We decided to collaborate on a  painting . So we decided to each use a 4' X 5' blank canvas. We would both start on our separate paintings without allowing the other to see the painting for 3 months.  Then we switched paintings and I painted on his painting and he painted on mine.  We then switched again after 3 months and painted the final coat on the painting that was our original painting.  We met to view the 2 paintings with a third party and  I believe we flipped a coin.  I won the toss  and this is the painting I picked.  I really love this piece!  I think we both learned a lot from each others techniques.  I still can't figure out how he did some of the composition.

When I had a studio on the third floor of Hot Shops in Omaha Nebraska every artist on the floor decided to do our own rendition/take on a painting by Diego Velasquez, a famous Spanish painter from 6he 1600's, titled "Las Meninas" ( see below).

The geometric structure and intersecting lines of the original painting are duplicated in this painting in an effort to the draw the viewer into comparing the original to this one. 

The artist/painter is Pablo Picasso.  The canvas Pablo is in front of is taken from an art history book describing the painting and artist; the paintings in the background are "Las Maninas", a painting by the artist Miro and a portrait of the artist himself, Diego Velasquez.Barbie and McDonalds is represented.  The other images/elements of the painting are used to draw your eye to other areas of the painting.

In many of my small pieces the frame is made to become part of the piece, not just a frame to frame the piece. This is a mixed media piece consisting of  colored and patterned duct tape woven into drawings, scrap book paper and a gold stenciled frame.  If you look closely you can see a representational black and white horse head.  Thus the name of the painting from the song by the Oak Ridge Boys " Elvira!"  Oom poppa oom poppa mow mow! Giddyup. Heigh-ho silver away!" 

Designed especially for my birth son and his family, translated it means "love the family forever."  Originally designed as a table top, they loved it so much they hung on the wall in the entry to their new home in Texas.  Influenced by calligraphy and Chinese art, it is comprised of acrylic, gold leaf and tissue paper on a hardwood panel.

Sometime a few years ago I was on the way home from a date around midnight, driving down Lincoln Avenue (which was a dirt road at the time) in Papillion, Nebraska.  This was before all the houses and burbs were built around the area. There was only one  farm house to the East of me with lots of corn fields that lay fallow.  It was a full moon that night and it was around midnight.  Out of nowhere a stampede of Hereford cattle came charging at my car.  Like deer in my headlights I came to an abrupt stop ending up on the side of the road. Dust was everywhere!  I immediately jumped  out of the car.  No cattle anywhere to be seen. Scared the wits out of me!

The next day I went to the farm house and told them that there cattle were loose and what happened the night before.  They said they hadn't had any cattle in over 10 years!  After talking to several people about the incident many believed that I had passed intersected with another place in time.  The cattle were just as freaked out as I was.  Whatever one chooses to believe, the painting is the vision I had in my mind of the action and colors as they were charging through in the dark - flashes of color before your eyes, minimal and yet still very noticeable.

Before painting this piece I was studying the color theory of Joseph Albers.  He would use squares or rectangles of color to represent something other then what they were.  Ambiguously I used the square to function the same as a setting sun except in the representational water instead of the sky. Take the square image away and the painting does not work visually.

The water is wrapping paper with the wrinkles symbolic and referring to a ripple effect such as what you see in water. The same paper is used in the purple sky except it is peeled and sanded down to feel soft to the touch instead of shiny like the paper used to represent the water.

I use photographs as thumbnails, manipulating them, zooming in and out to the point of abstraction in a final painting.  When I lived in Papillion, Nebraska I lived on top of a hill.  Looking to the East I could see the storms arising in Iowa ready to burst in the most beautiful colors before the thunderstorm hit. This painting was taken from a photograph of a  large grouping of orange cumulonimbus clouds I witnessed in Iowa.  My minds eye visualized the inside of the cloud, focusing on certain aspects of the photograph to blow it up.  Using the Golden Mean in developing the composition of the painting I accomplished the effect for the viewer  of drawing ones eye directly into the center of the  painting.

I like ambiguity in my paintings.  If you look at the dark area of the original painting the brush strokes are not in one direction. They look black but look closer.  You can see the browns and dark blues hidden on the surface. The brush strokes move around as if a storm were brewing.  What is the calm?  The center of the orange cloud/rectangle or the darkness around it? Is the darkness around it or surrounding it?  Is it being sucked into becoming the light?  What is brewing inside of....you?

Influenced by the Holy Trinity this painting reflects the light from heaven  ambiguously portrayed as a triangular ray of light and/or a pyramid - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Look closely and you may see clouds rolling over the ocean waves or are they waves instead.  the Golden rectangle they are sitting within - is it a window, a shelf, an opening, or just a rectangle that the images rest in?  The red upside down triangle - is it a cloth hanging over a sill or just a triangle used as element to to guide your eyes to drop further down in the dark space?  The dark space, if you look closer , in the original is thick green, purple and brown transparent paint barely transparent over swirls of paint underneath the surface.  Again, much like Calm Before The Storm I what emerges from the darkness or better yet, what lies beneath the darkness?  All is not darkness or light.

This painting started out to be part of the Calm Before the Storm series. However, in the middle of the process I came down with severe migraines for quite some time.  When it was finished it looked like my migraine felt. Thus the name of the piece. The basket is comprised of acrylic paint with a stick woven into cut canvas.  Above the basket, the trim of the basket, colored cellophane, striped cloth and thick string is woven into cut canvas.  Reminds me of the joy of having a beautiful basket which could contain a surprises.  When looking into the basket a migraine emerges full force with flashes of white light.  The red glow you can barely see in the background is the throbbing and pounding that comes with a severe migraine. Anyone who has suffered a severe migraine understands what the nightmare is all about.

While visiting my sister in Chino Valley, AZ we would always sit outside and have a bonfire.  The sky was always so full of stars.  But one night I was there the moon was high and full it seemed so bazaar that the sky was so black - no stars.  It was cool and there was tooly fog all around.  You could still see the moon and the only reflection of the moon in a distant lake or pond far off in the distance.

The original painting looks black until you view it closer then you can see the midnight blues and purples emerge out of the darkness along with the fog line that appears along the mountain ridge. The moon was so amazing because that was all you could see - so big and bright and awesome - paint worthy and that's what it became.