Through continuing summer residencies (1994 to 2017) as a visiting artist and teacher at Dine`College, Navajo Nation in Northeast Arizona, I have had the opportunity to engage myself with new and extraordinary places and events in the Western landscape. Accompanying the drama of the landscape, my personal experiences of living among the Navajo people have revealed the profound levels to which the Navajo cultural perspectives seek to position the human spirit in harmonious relationship with nature.

Though I travel in the work through various states of observed and invented space (streams of consciousness and imagination), I am ultimately searching to unveil the moment in when the physical is transcended, and our relationship with nature moves profoundly towards an interior engagement. I feel strongly tied to the work of the Early American Modernists and to the lineage of the spiritual as explored by artists through time.

The series of paintings represented in this body of work explore the subject of Canyon de Chelly. At the heart of the work is the search for the poetic essense in things as experienced, remembered and imagined.

Included following the series of paintings under "Spirit of Place, Canyon de Chelly" are a selection of early watercolors from the Northeast part of the Navajo Nation. Working on location over the course of twenty two summers these watercolor paintings carry for me special meaning in my personal meditation on place.