About the Artist

Education
B.A. California State University, Chico, 1986
Museum Collections
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
California State University, Chico Museum of Natural History
Center for Art+Environment Archive, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno

I am an artist investigating the intersections of ecology, archeology, storytelling, memory and place. There are many experiences that formed me as an artist and three stand out in this moment. My sense of landscape was altered by five seasons as a wild-land firefighter. Second, is the two winters I spent as the studio assistant for the solar-kinetic sculptor Lowell Jones. Third, I spent three years as the artist in residence at the Vertebrate Museum at California State University, Chico where I produced watercolors of North American birds from study skins and sculpted models of nudibranchs and other mollusks.

These paintings at Peyton Wright are abstract but not non-object. The compositions were derived from specific socio-ecological sources, the petroglyphs at Grimes Point in Northern Nevada and the geo-glyphs at the Blythe Intaglios near the Colorado River in Southern California. It is my intent to reconfigure the geometry of the prehistoric forms to craft a new vocabulary of contemporary symbols. The Blythe paintings include an additional experiment. I have synthesized the ancient geo-glyphs with the traverse maps of the Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The traverse maps seem so pictographic to me. By synthesizing these elements. I want to intuit and imply a span of time and geographic space. However, it was important to me that these paintings retained a primary abstract nature. I did not want the paintings to depict something but to become something.