Altered Terrain: Changes and Consequences book introduction
Personal experiences, and all that I have absorbed during a life of seeing and learning, undergird my art process and resulting images and poetry. While pairing light bulbs with jawbones, forks with planet Earth, rubber duckies and live ducks, and sextants with tractor shovel loaders, I fashion a Language of symbols that tell stories of changes and consequences in the altered terrain—landscapes in which we live.
Each ink/acrylic drawing or collage is built around these real or symbolic objects. They may seem unrelated to each other, but actually reflect the increasing impact of humankind upon Earth’s living biospheres. Given the scope of the universe, humankind is not the center around which all resolves as we commonly think. But we are only one aspect of Nature’s Dream. Contrary to traditional ideas of human superiority, each life form, even those we cannot see, is but a precious mask of the Great Face Behind—the Great Dreaming Creator.

In most of these works, a large figure dominates and tells a story of humankind’s casual abandonment of the home we call Earth in favor of alternative paradises: technology-produced comforts based on rising energy use. My finely honed technique and a strong concern for the environment pair up with a personality characterized by a questioning bent and a sense of humor to form these surreal pictures; stories of the American landscape and our disconnects/connections to it. The fun for me is in trying out unusual combinations of forms and solving the mysteries of the links between them. I hope viewers will recognize questions posed in the pictures—questions asking each of us how we are called to be responsible stewards of the wonderful, but rapidly diminishing Web of Life.