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

title : cumulus mammatus
medium : oil pastel on butcher block paper
dimensions : guessing … maybe 15″ squarish …

I am digging up my hand-coloured past having exhausted the supply of recent work. Among other things this virtual location is being built to archive my works if for no other purpose than to document their existence. This piece is long gone and decomposing in a landfill for all I know. I gave it to a friend who liked it very much but I have lost touch with her since then.

A mammatus cloud formation is the kind of thing you might see a long way from here, in dry/mountainous regions.

“Cumulus mammatus … a series of pouch-shaped cloud elements hanging downward from a middle or upper cloud layer … a sky mostly filled with large mammatus clouds indicates a very strong thunderstorm was or is nearby, or may be approaching …”
- National Audobon Society Field Guide to North American Weather

I dream of the big-sky country and taking up with a wild band of weather-chasers. I may yet.

title : mother and child
medium : watercolour, pencil & ink on paper
dimensions : 4 3/4″ wide x 5 3/8″ high

Today, in North America at least, we observe the calendar date reserved by a greeting card company for the propagation and sale of Mother’s Day greetings, flowers, luncheons and dinners. That being said, the capitalist root of it all duly noted, I cannot object to it because mothers are such unsung heroes in this culture.

If your mother was less than good to you then she was surely under some terrible weight and could not quite lift it. Forgive her. Before you landed on earth her body was your home planet. Without the transitional home she provided you would not have survived here. If you find your life to be a curse you cannot thank her for then you are asleep in the underworld and you must wake up to find the way home.

Whomever mothered you is your mother and it may not be the person who carried you inside. Our mother’s are the best picture of interconnectedness that we can find. Consider your belly button.

Honour your mother, regardless.