An overview of my research for 2001-2002 describes a strong studio schedule working out of West Coast and Midwest locations, marked by active national exhibiting. The art produced during this period exemplifies the two significant directions of my work: a continuum I identify in the phrase "From the Physical to the Metaphysical". Each direction is as necessary as the other, fitting together the complementary and diverse components of my interests.

The physical direction was taken as I completed more work on the Barely Ever Legal series out of my Madison studio. These images feature aggressive mark-making, a strident viscosity technique, and angular and transgressive women. In the Mind Over Matter series produced this past summer at the Graphic Arts Workshop in San Francisco, linkages occur, energy erupts, and the unexpected happens. These images look most closely like landscapes, but landscapes with an inflection of "mind", or metaphysics. These works embrace a "Sense of Place", but for me, be it a sanctuary or battlefield, "place" is a fluid structure that is located as much within the emotions, body or brain, as it is on any roadmap. To quote Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth: "The Garden is the place of unity, of nonduality, of male and female, good and bad, God and human beings...Getting back to that Garden is the aim of many a religion."

In the late 1970's, A Sense of Place was a popular picture-laden book of contemporary landscape art. It featured people like my teacher Neil Welliver who drew their aesthetic from an immersion in place (for Welliver, the Maine woods). A large part of my own identity and aesthetic searching emerged from youthful photo treks along Massachusetts' "North (of Boston) Shore", eyeing how the water met the land in Marblehead, Gloucester, Ipswich and Salem. Years later, in 2002, my work is still infused with a sense of place, but that is not the real "subject" of the art. This summer's pieces may have titles like Hunker Down Méxicana, and Cornfields, Snow and Clouds (Never Prosaic #1), but the actuality of pinpointed locale is a tangential reference for the topic of metaphysics: Energy and Mind. In the Mind Over Matter series, all entities, be they animal, vegetable, or mineral, project energy into the whole. An active but invisible participant in these works is human Mind- a consciousness that often dives into subterranean spaces.

The Mind Over Matter series alludes to everyday existence and our challenge of projecting an energy that is more powerful than the matter that entangles us. In such works as Matter Undermined, At The Temple, and What is Important, the prominence of softly-gradated, blue-to-white stretches of "sky" represent an ethereal, light expansiveness, free from such mental and physical burdens. Done in a decided horizontal format, with uncomfortable median slices and fractured area grids, this series refuses to see only one side of any one moment. Simultaneity and multiplicity of experience are prominent features of these works. Tension exists hand-in-hand with solace, aggression with gentleness.

In the smaller pieces, such as Full Frontal Fluidity, linear transparency of forms also reflects simultaneity and inclusiveness of experience, but in a less fragmented format. To me, the small works represent the gemlike moments of consciousness we experience, while the larger images find us tasting ecstasy of all natures but bound at the edge of every experience by rectangular control. The persistent energy of my marks strikes out beyond these bars, but the bars always bisect, contain and restrain, be the place paradise or bliss.

Recurrent motifs include riderless, drifting boats, boats with a solitary, hooded traveler, bowls, birdhouses (structures on sticks), bowls on sticks, fields that become lagoons that then become oceans, transparent boxes, and pear-like "shrubs" that diminish in a row or spin like toy tops. Text is still an integral component of my work, not only as a signifier of meaning, but as a direct energetic extension of the brain / hand linkage.

In conclusion, both directions, "From the Physical to the Metaphysical", command my attention. I am always anxious to get back to the one after intense production in the other. Delving into these complementary realms, as I did during the 2001-2002 Period, fulfills my need to visually examine my deepest concerns.