Play has been my focus of late in the studio. I’ve been exploring new techniques and concentrating on developing layers and textures in my work. This new body of work that is developing is more abstract and less image-oriented than the work I’ve done previously.
This painting is called Longing. It’s a 30″ x 15″ canvas that incorporates acrylic glazes and pastes along with stamping techniques. More of my abstract paintings are in a new gallery on my website.
I’ve never been a concept artist. My bodies of work come together in unexpected ways and seem to find their own way with little conscious direction from me. This has been true with photography and I’ve recently discovered that it’s also true in my mixed media work.
A couple of years ago, I worked on my first abstract painting. When I had taken it as far as I knew how, I named it Abstract 001, hung it on my wall and called it done.
I pulled the painting out this spring and began to work on it again. The finished piece has evolved into something quite different from the original painting. 
It’s now called Pierced by Desire and is hanging at the Jennie Cooley Gallery in Santa Fe through the end of March as part of a group show called Hot Monkey Love.
Over the holidays, my cousin Douglas brought his entire family to Santa Fe to ski. The snow wasn’t great that weekend so his girls got to participate in an impromptu painting workshop that I held in my studio. The results were amazing. Miyabi, who is fifteen, made this collage piece using a transfer of a vintage letter and photograph along with other collage elements.
This one with words and textures is my favorite.
Years ago during classes at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography, I learned that there was never any need to feel protective of my photographic images. At school, we often went out in groups to shoot at the same location and no matter how many people took photos standing in exactly the same spot, no two images were ever alike. That was proven true again when my friend Nancy Nickel and I went to a flea market in Paris and took pictures of the same head. Her collage piece is on the left and my photograph is below.
Meet Luna. She hangs around Las Chivas, the coffee shop where I get my morning brew. Dana gives her huge milk bone treats which she promptly buries. You can visit her and my other dog portraits on my website.
I’ve begun work on a new series called THE MEMORY PROJECT where I use old snapshots, personal letters and mementos in a mixed media painting to create a one-of-a-kind remembrance of family and friends. This piece was created for my friend David using snapshots of his parents courting. 
These commissioned pieces are a way to commemorate a moment or an era in your own life or in the lives of loved ones. As all the photos and papers are scanned, none of the originals are changed or destroyed.
At the end of May, I threw my camera in the car and Tulip and I headed west to Santa Cruz to visit my old friend, David. I had hoped to see wild flowers in the desert, but no such luck. I drove hundreds of miles without an urge to photograph anything. It wasn’t until David and I went to lunch one day that I stumbled upon an old gas tank that I thought had possibilities.
I returned several times to the restaurant to photograph it and it has become the inspiration for a series of abstract paintings that are in the works.
I recently took several small paintings I had completed to my friend Bob Godwin at Image House Santa Fe, a fine art digital printing service. He scanned the pieces and printed them several times larger than the original paintings. The results were surprising as the prints are full of textures that are hiding under layers of paint in the original paintings. I now see this new body of work in several steps. The painting, followed by the print which once mounted on a wood panel can be painted into again. This whole process has opened some unexpected creative doors. This is one of the new prints called Awakening. 
