These mixed media pieces explore the phenomenon of looking and seeing, how we impose our favorite stories on what we see, and, conversely, how our way of seeing shapes us. As a writer I have always projected narratives on the facts of the world. As a visual artist I have learned to be open to the patterns and themes that arise in my explorations, things I never knew, that ask to be articulated.

LOOKING IN/ The Nighthouses

When I was a child, we lived in a small town in the tobacco country of North Carolina, and would take long car drives on rural roads to see a movie, or go to a real restaurant sometimes. On the way home, we went through villages, dark except for the lights in interior windows in the homes. At night I could see people reading books or having dinner or gesticulating in the living room, and I made up stories about these glimpsed lives. The Nighthouses reflect the same curiosity. This series started years back when I was taking long walks in the Bywater, and coming home and composing what I made of what I saw. The images and people inside the houses in the paintings evoke history and the present, and fanciful futures and pasts, imposed upon and set inside our elegant, and unreal, architecture.

LOOKING OUT/ The Seers

Mystics and scientists tell us that the universe is a whole lot more complex than the one that we perceive. Our everyday reality is threaded through our senses’ limitations, our experience, our environment. But there is something more.The characters in these portraits are looking out, not blinded, but blended into their surroundings, showing us who they really are, revealing the kinds of marvels that made them, be it the streets of this city, the forest, the cosmos, the shelter of others, the night sky, or the rushing ocean. William Blake said, “We See a Lie, when we see with, not through, the eye.” These seers know they are looking through their windows, at us.