Artist's Statement:
I suspect that the themes behind most of my artwork can be found with a reach back down the rabbit hole, with a grab for the magic that filled the world when I was a ten-year-old; the half-grasped mysteries of nature, sex and death, the hidden hand-drawn maps of our next adventure...all that good stuff. When I was ten, the whole world was a wild frontier, the screen door slamming behind me just the prelude to the next adventure. 

Eastern Colorado is hot in the summer. There aren’t many trees and not much shade. We roamed the foothills in ragtag squads of four or five, armed with BB guns and slingshots, canteens on our belts. Our backyard was 25 square miles of open prairie and the only limit to our wandering was an admonition to be home before dark.

One day, off in a new direction, we stumbled upon a deep gulch snaking through the buffalo grass, a raw gash in the earth unnoticed until we stood at its edge. Without a word we slid down the embankment to investigate. It was cool and shady at the bottom, exotic with a tiny trickle of a creek. 

We found two wondrous things that day. The first was a long-dead cow, belly up, that had died by either, (a) falling into the gully, (b) drowning in a flash flood, or, (c) giving birth to the calf that was still stuck halfway out into the world. Both the cow and calf had been gnawed on and pecked at by the coyotes and magpies and were now just a lot of mummified leather and bone. The translucent skin stretched across the cow’s ribcage looked like the canvas and wood wing of a Fokker tri-plane. The other thing we discovered that day was the cave.

Part-way up the gully wall was an opening just big enough to crawl through. Once inside we could stand. A niche carved near the entrance held a band-aid box with matches and candles which we promptly lit, revealing a chamber about ten feet by six. Crude anatomical drawings were etched into the dirt walls, creepy in the candlelight, and there was a lot of stuff — a woman’s wig, a crucifix of bones and shells, an armless Barbie, a pile of feathers. A second, smaller room, lead off to the right where we discovered a milk crate full of old Plaboy magazines.

Inspired, we returned the next day armed with flashlights, trowels and a geologist’s pick — a child’s urge to dig holes in the Earth is one of the great, unexplained forces of nature. By the end of the summer we had added another room and a twenty-foot tunnel going straight back into the embankment. When we weren't digging, we smoked cigarettes rolled from newspapers and dried weeds, thumbed through the Playboys, or followed the edge of “Dead Man’s Creek” in search of snakes to capture and sell to the pet store. Fortunately for us, we never encountered the owner of the wig.

One weekend that fall after school had resumed we returned to the cave and found it had collapsed. What if, we wondered, someone was still in there, crushed and dead under tons of dirt. how horrible would THAT be. No kids were reported missing that fall, none that we heard of anyway, so probably not. But you never know.

I had no idea when I was ten years old where my life would lead. In retrospect I see that my childhood adventures that summer and in the summers that followed were perfect preliminary lessons for the education of an artist. Art is about far more than moving paint around on canvas to make pictures. It’s about mystery and creation and destruction. It’s about constantly trying to apprehend that which is hiding just out of sight…somewhere down the rabbit hole…