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.

I finished this cityscape painting in a class taught by Sandra Duran Wilson at the Santa Fe School of Art.

I started by laying down an assortment of acrylic gels and textures onto the board. My new favorite texture is white opaque flakes by Liquitex. You can see the results of this medium along the upper right corner of the piece sweeping down the side of the clock. The “buildings” are squares of the plaster cloth used for making casts for broken bones.

I covered the textures in several layers of color washes and then added the clock and the carpet with soft gel transfers. More color and texture was added. The nude figure is a digital print on a skin of Golden fiber paste. This 10″ x 8″ painting is a study for a larger piece.

Here’s some new work that is coming out of my mixed media explorations. The piece on the left is a 5″ x 5″ canvas that uses my photographic images along with acrylic paints, gold foil and sheer cloth. The face is a statue I fell in love with in a cemetery in Savannah, Georgia. The dead rose was found in San Francisco. The piece is called “Memory.”