What Holds Us Together, series 2, no. 19. Graphite, ink, colored pencil and cotton floss on paper. 4.25x6”. 2020
The other weekend a new friend and I rode our motorcycles east, dodging pocket thunderstorms in search of a city reputed to be one of the saddest in the country. Waves of searing heat distorted flat brown plains as semis and pickup trucks jockeyed for position along the endless stretch of bleached, shredded tire-strewn concrete that is US Interstate 10. Off in the distance, the horizon was broken by oil wells and refineries, some dead, others pulsing with artificial life, metal skin glinting in the sun. A mix of salt, crude oil and overheated brake pads lent a taste to the air I found comforting.
Getting soaked makes me euphoric. Rain bombs hitting my body, evaporating off in steamy hisses as I move at 80 mph through the June East Texas heat. Suddenly I am cool, clean, awake and very much alive. A feeling enhanced by the anticipation of exploring another unfamiliar place, of attempting to satisfy a craving that burns me on the inside, growing consistently more violent ever since I left New Jersey three years ago. It’s an addiction now. Satiated only by the pursuit of people and places antagonizing my heart and imagination out there in the periphery, for the moment beyond reach.
What Holds Us Together, series 1, no 4. Graphite, ink and cotton floss on paper. 6 x 4.25”. 2020
Port Arthur is therefore an appropriate destination choice. It is filled with shadows. A gutted shell of a place, it wears its former glory on its sleeve, promising gilded futures on rotting billboards and faded vinyl signs now falling from the fronts of empty stores and apartment buildings. The oil industry upon which these promises were built is itself dying fast, while hurricanes and petrochemical spills have ravaged structures and poisoned fish, making it damned hard to sustain a comfortable life here.
The result is in the broken windows and peeling layers of 20-year-old coats of paint. Glorious blinking neon signs lay abandoned inside hotel lobbies that’d be boarded up save for that little hole in the plank covering the street front window.. which I’m small enough to crawl through.
These holes lead to secrets. To stuff spirited away and concealed beneath optimistic surfaces, hidden from plain sight for a reason.
The holes lead to what’s real.
The real remains trapped inside my head as I spend hours and hours churning out paintings in this living-room-cum-studio. The paintings are based on an increasingly distant past, of moments in my journey through the Americas that grow more vivid in my mind as time shifts.
No, I'm not in Santa, Peru; Panama City or La Paz, Bolivia anymore…but I carry these places around with me everywhere. They overlap and bleed into THIS moment, into the now, seeping into my computer screen, atop this black Ikea desk, inside this turn-of-the-century bungalow I've been given to sleep in, situated in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston, Southeast Texas, USA.
The paintings, then, arise out of that space between. The forms and colors seep out of the cracks in the sidewalks, out of the iridescent oil stains making broken oval shapes between yellow paint lines in strip mall parking lots. 95-degree heat waves rippling off the surface of I-10 merge with memories of light refracting from the surface of Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, turning up in splashes of titanium white that spread out slowly, soaking and staining this thick rag paper.
This is my sanity. There is clarity in this meeting point between desire and actual experience. A kind of road map is emerging, honoring and celebrating the scary and beautiful stuff I’ve seen, while helping me make sense of what it means to be here in this country during a particularly bloody and chaotic moment in its history, without a man, pets, or the infinite challenges of the road to distract me.
I could be somewhere else right now, if money were no object. In Croatia, Tierra del Fuego, or Brazil, trying to figure out how to fix a punctured tire on the side of a rocky road, waiting for some kind local soul to swoop in and bail me out. Instead, others have given me the choice of being here and making meaning out of where I've gone and what I've done so far.
Sometimes the walls close in.. but then I’ll go ahead and beat my head up against them for a while. I may make a bloody mess. But from the bits of brain a pattern emerges, and the way out is getting clearer and clearer.