After an initial adjustment to the Midwest, the year 2001 saw a renewed period of creative investigation. Between January 2001 and Spring Break, I began work on the Chronic Case series. These are viscosity monotypes in which swirling forms turn into alchemic vessels. The bowl or cup motif is a recurrent (20+ year) theme found in many of my works. It suggests: to be round, warm, to hold in your hands; to cup, to cradle; to focus, to contain, to go within; from tears in a coffee cup to organs in a canopic jar. My hand seems to make these forms by itself. The title "Chronic Case" refers to issues of ease / dis-ease and coping with unsettling interactions of body and mind. This theme of tension / relief / tension impacts most of my work.

During Spring Break, when for once the prospect of Whitewater as a ghost town seemed very attractive, I found myself in a wonderful distraction-free immersion of creative research. Many ideas and visual images came rushing to me during that period of quiet and concentration. I want to comment on the ideas that were generated and the techniques and aesthetics of a new direction.

It was Easter week, and I was sitting in Whitewater, Wisconsin: The time and the place coalesced, sparking a clarity of thought and image, the re-emergence of recurrent themes. The ideas are fluid in respect to this and future work: Sex, Love and Death. Catholicism and Voodoo. Catholicism and Sex. Transgression. As a wayward Catholic with a particular love for Crucifixion iconography, I was compelled (for the first time in 20 years), to find the local Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. I happily stumbled upon the Latino "Passion of Christ" before the white folks (that reminded me of the homogeneous New England upbringing that I had escaped), emerged. Of the ideas that came streaming out, here are three that form an iconographic framework for the direction of my current visual research: #1. Oddity and Difference. (And then, not only being perceived as "different" but making a difference). #2. Monoculture Mesmerism. (Ignorance is Bliss). #3. Transgression. (Socially, Sexually, and, of course, Politically, as in Thoreau's anarchistic dissent).

During that Easter week, I began working in a new direction of full sheet (22" x 30") bleed prints technically constructed upon a loosely overlapping system of segment viscosities. The images were first drawn as contour line compositions on a large Plexiglas plate. This provided the structural framework for the loose, fluid and expressionistic painting. The prints were a sensation-charged experience painted vertically on an easel. The drips and dribbles were integrated into the whole. I selected a new limited palette for myself in warm earthy colors. The works in this new direction include: Welcome Home #1, Alchemic Clinic, Hobo's Lullaby (Woody Guthrie), and Nice Voodoo, Thinking of You.

During the summer, teaching in San Francisco, I continued these formal and thematic concerns. I was thinking of the experiential space that vacillates between work and play, and in the idea of "adult playmates". I wanted the body to tell its story, no matter how disconcerting. There are hints of carnal knowledge (Private Playmate), transgression (Barely Ever Legal), intellectualism vs. raunchy sex (Work and Play / Professor Paglia), and how love, after awhile, becomes an affliction (Love and War / Playmate). The individual's transgression within and against societal norms is the essential theme of the Barely Ever Legal series.

The formal design of these pieces is multi-episodic in nature, often built up in grids of segment viscosities and relative opacities of ink. I have relished the use of words within these works- not only in their potential for multiple layers of meaning (Keep your Bags Packed), but in their purest mark-making sense. Some images incorporate transfer techniques, drawing, intaglio, transparency, and pierced surfaces (i.e. grommets).

It has been a pleasure to be so engaged by the making of these unsettling images, which seem to mirror my personality. As the artist Francis Bacon once said: "All one can hope to do is make paintings which are as close to one's nervous system as one possibly can".