Artist Statement
I am a poet and visual artist who spent many years moonlighting as a philosophy professor. That the most important influence on my work is the Texas Panhandle became clear to me when I moved to the Chicago area for college. The city piqued my interest in how the Plains formed my eyes, made me conscious of learning to see nothing, and turned my attention to how light breaks on an unbroken horizon. I grew up in the region Georgia O’Keeffe called her “spiritual home,” but it was Chicago that brought her sense of light to my attention. Taking up John Cage's suggestion (which he says he took from Ananda Coomaraswamy) that the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation, I think of my work as an intersection of chance with design — a collaboration with the media, painting with light while celebrating the way(s) pigment takes to surface, not showing or telling so much as opening a space for a play of possibility.