title : hurricane elena
medium : oil on paper, wood support
dimensions : roughly 3 1/2′ wide x 4′ high

Hurricane Elena is truly the most encompassing thing I’ve made yet, my heart in my hands. There is more of me in this than any other thing I’ve tried. It is my picture worth ten hundred, thousand, million words.
Yes is in it . So is no.

In the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Weather I found many, plenty of photographs I wanted to paint. Published in September of 1991, I have a battered eighth printing, circa. 1998. It was supplied to me, brand new, off the shelf in 2002. I have had my way with it since then and it is quite weathered. I think I ought to read it more carefully but have been caught up in the pictures. Hurricane Elena’s photo was taken by an astronaut using a hand-held camera, from the satellite Discovery.

Months after I finished the painting I googled hurricane elena.

In 1985; Hurricane Elena’s erratic path over the Gulf of Mexico forced the evacuation of nearly one million people from low-lying coastal areas from Tampa, Florida to New Orleans, Louisiana. At the time, it was the largest peacetime evacuation in U.S. history. After hovering off the West Florida coast for six days, Elena finally made landfall near Biloxi, Mississippi on September 2 as a category 3 hurricane. Estimates of the total economic loss from Elena were near $1.3 billion. – courtesy of http://www.csc.noaa.gov