Because I was born in Louisiana and grew up in West Texas at the edge of the Edwards Plateau (the region of the Comanche Indians), my earliest influences were the wet, lush natural world of Louisiana and the shimmering heat and light of the Texas plains. Also apparent in my work, especially in the Italian Notebook Series, are the landscape, architecture, and art of Italy to which I return year after year. Later influenced by abstract expressionism and by the modernist penchant for making art about art, my art concerns itself with both the forms of nature and the nature of modern life. It is both ordered and chaotic and uses the broken grid as well as the lyrical circle and heart. In some paintings and paper works, the grid becomes something of a time frame, more or less like a strip of film, a moving story, a movement of cells and conduits. I use acrylic paint, photographs, and drawing and marks with pastels, pencil, ink, and colored chalk.
