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oil on black denim 9.5 x 6"

Keawakapu Beach, Maui

There is a profound sense of contentment in the flexibility I've learned to  allow myself when deep in the throes of my creative process. Toting my supplies most places I went, I've made many paintings on the beaches of Maui, and always had my ukulele or guitar  with me.  I'd play and sing for hours, songs from the Beatles, Janis Joplin, Cat Stevens, Foo Fighters, Little River Band, Indigo Girls, George Harrison, Tom Petty...  gravitating toward folk, blues, rock, instrumentals, and originals. I'd drink coconut water, eat ahi poke, munch on kale chips and fresh fruit like mango, strawberry papaya, and apple bananas, in between swimming with turtles and body surfing clear blue ocean waves. I left Maui in 2018 to seek medical treatment in Tennessee, but lived in Hawai`i (the second time) for ten years.

The red boat, red sky, red water, represents the color of love, pain, intensity, purification, passion, and the fires of creativity. Painted with a palette knife at the beach plein air style, looking out on the water, there were often sail boats anchored. I've loved to sail since my first time getting on a sloop with my father as a child in Antigua. A few times I went blue fishing with my favorite male cousins out on the Atlantic. The floor of the boat would be covered with gutted fish blood. I can still taste the metallic salty smell mixed with  diesel fumes, and I loved every minute of it. We'd take the fish home to my favorite aunt and she'd make a big fish fry. Writing here about my process lifts these memories out of the cobwebs of my mind. Some of my happiest moments were with my cousins and my Aunt Annie, who is an incredible artist. There was a time or two when she sacrificed a lot for me.  I'll never forget her kindness, patience, her love and most of all her lighthearted, hilarious laugh and beautiful face. She was my life preserve several times over when in my early life I was working through personal trauma.

 oil collage on flat canvas 10.5 x 9"

A year after I moved to Maui and became divorced, I discovered Nichiren Buddhism. Spending twelve years studying and praying Nam Myoho Renge Kyo (power of the mystic law) I learned about how a huge part of this philosophy focuses on the power of positive thinking. Nichiren Buddhists can turn any negative into a positive and believe that all people have the potential to become enlightened in this lifetime! Nichiren Buddhists, although using no idolatry of any kind like statues of Buddha, as we believe that we all have "Buddha-nature" inside each one us, use the symbol of the lotus flower to show that from the mud lives and grows the exquisite lotus flower. My own twist on this philosophy has the snake signifying that the anti-venom is derived from the venom. Why would I do that you might wonder? During my tender years, before my life-saving kidney operation when I was seven years-old on Valentine's Day, 1977, I always had night terrors of snakes and spiders hatching out of millions of eggs all around me in every direction. Sometimes the snakes and spiders were as big as a building. Christians and other religions believe the symbology of the snake represents the going against god. Nothing could be further from the truth in my work. The snake is not god's fallen angel in my dreams or in my world, but quite the contrary. I learned later in life that shamans and other spiritualists call these visions, from my dreams, "initiation."

The terrifying images of snakes and spiders completely disappeared from my dreams after the surgery was successful! As I became ill again in my thirties, the nightmares returned. Rather than seek therapy, I discovered shamanism and studied consciousness and dream interpretation. The next ten years of shamanistic study, travel, and practice is what preceded a serendipitous finding of Nichiren Buddhism. Like many people who have suffered themselves, mentally or physically, they learn most about elixirs to help heal themselves. For me, that elixir is art.

The shaman builds bridges between the real and ideal, the unconscious and conscious, truth and illusion, dark and light, dream and reality, and are in total sync with their environments, particularly animals and nature or dreaming. My entire life I've sought to understand the purpose of suffering and the paths to joy. The snake represents making the best out of the worst situation. That is part of what my art is intended to do, and does unfailingly! It is also an underlying theme for the book I'm writing.

oil on black denim 12.75 x 10" 

Created at Keawakapu Beach, better known in Maui as Dolphin Beach. 

This link will take you to my artist statement at Mānoa Horizons Undergraduate Journal for University of Hawai`i at Mānoa where I write about the influence Hawai`i, and my education in Hawai`i, has had on my life and art. Some of my paintings and collages pay homage to culturally significant Hawaiian history. Please take a few moments to read about what it is really like for Hawaiians and people living in the Hawaiian islands today.

 Often times, I use denim fragments to clean my brushes. The random placement of color I visit later, sometimes ten years later. Isee images in the splotches of paint and I line-brush the forms that appear in my imagination. Sometimes it's hills, other times people or animals or surreal depictions. It could be anything. There is sometimes intent with forming the images to bring awareness to a topic, while in other instances the structures are created impulsively with thoughts and feelings escaping from my subconscious.

oil collage on denim 7.5 x 2.5"

A lot people associate rainbows with Hawai`i. I created a golden rainbow to tie in the idea of Dorothy, from the Wizard of Oz, on the yellow brick road, looking for home.  I know the feeling of being lost and not feeling like any place is truly home. So here, instead of painting the feeling of being lost, I paint the idea of being found. Can you can see the colorful silhouettes of buildings suggesting that although Hawai`i is thought to be remarkably natural, it isn't a perfectly untouched paradise. 

oil collage on denim 6.25 x 7"

I had this piece for several years, half-finished. It felt like something was missing, perhaps a part of my life that hadn't happened yet. There are many pieces I have that sit like a lady in waiting, waiting for the right moment, and then it comes along and it all makes sense... to me. For a long time it just had the red lava coming down the mountain, before Hawai`i's Kīlauea's recent eruption, destroying homes and pristine topography. The lava crawled over lush land and into the sea, clearing everything in its wake. Why I went with white flames eating the ground? White, as I've studied it in terms of metaphor, can represent a cleansing or purification, and that is what I felt Pele has done.

With the geothermal site built in the 1980's on Kīlauea, its construction invaded sacred lands and the U.S. government forbade Hawaiian families from entering those lands, forested lands that their ancestors had been utilizing and dwelling in for hundreds of years. Many Hawaiians believe this was the Hawaiian Goddess Pele's way of returning those lands to its first peoples, after the recent eruption of lava crawled dangerously close to the geothermal plant. To this day, Hawaiians are fighting for the return of their lands, as conglomerates also continue to redirect fresh water streams from the ahupua`a systems to feed golf courses, resorts, subdivisions and other properties. This redirection of historical and naturally occurring waterways has had a devastatingly disruptive effect on part of the hydrologic cycle that has kept the Hawaiian islands lush and bountiful. These diversions and profane misuses and abuse of Hawaiian Āina (land), and fresh and salt water supplies, has caused catastrophic and in some areas irreversible damage to ecosystems and to Hawaiian first peoples. Unless you study about Hawai`i, people don't realize the brutality the islands and their peoples have sustained. Learn  the truth.

oil collage on red canvas 13 x 5" 

I work with a vivid spectrum of colors, although sometimes I enjoy dappling in a monochromatic palette depending on my mood.  While I am creating the collages, once I am passed the point of randomness in my process, and images and ideas emerge, there is a particular manner in which I then choose to introduce form, intention, and meaning.

oil collage on canvas paper 11 x 14"

While going back and forth with the editors for the publication of my cover art for the 2019 Mānoa Horizons Journal, I was especially inspired. In dream interpretation, the house can represent the mind. Lower parts of the house, like the basement, can represent more unconscious thoughts and impulses, whereas the attic or roof represents expanding awareness. When I first learned this, several years ago,  my first collages would have the houses with the roofs tipping off, falling over, detaching from the houses. This was intended to be understood as open-mindedness and enlightenment. Here, twenty years later and still creating collages, in this painting the black roofs signify the mind containing the darkest truth, and also my grieving and not having known for so long about iwi kūpuna and other's grieving for the desecration of sacred bones, sacred heirlooms, sacred land, sacred water, sacred life.

oil on canvas paper 14 x 11"

In true surrealist approach, I allow unconscious thoughts to rise to the surface. After the random placement of colors, I go back to contemplate what I see. Here, it was people, like mighty giants, playing on the  colorful mountain range as if it was a hopscotch board. It reminds me of a time when I was still strong, when I eagerly traversed paths through pristine forested areas where I've lived and visited. Painted with both palette knife and brushes, different images will appear for different perceptions.

oil collage on denim  10 x 9"

To celebrate my birthday, I found an oil painting that never felt finished and spent the evening of my birthday cutting out the bones. Finally after having had this half-complete painting for several years, I took it full circle. A special homage piece for my birthday.

oil on canvas 3 x 4'

Stolen from Memphis Botanic Gardens 'Arts in Medicine' juried exhibit sponsored by Smith & Nephews, never recovered.

oil on denim, mounted on wood used for drying greenware pottery 10 x 10"

When I was twenty years old and had been living in Maui Hawai`i for a year, I had a few thousand in the bank, but gave up my room for rent and took my pencils, pens, markers, and drawing pad and went around Maui for six months completely homeless.

I slept at poolsides that I got kicked out of in the middle of the night, slept on the beach waking up to sand crabs crawling all over my body, slept in dark deep caves and on insect filled hillsides, and also in random people's houses. Once I slept in a tree. Not a treehouse, just a tree. I drew and scribbled in my art pad and sometimes would sell a drawing. I wrote lots of poetry and was utterly connected with my creative core. There were no barriers. Many a night, I was cold, alone, scared, uncomfortable, but I was also  happy.

Never took a sip of alcohol or had a puff of pot. My drug was being alive. Some lookedat me, a homeless person,  like I was the dregs of society. They didn't know I was an artist seeking pure happiness in just being as real as I could possibly be. I was up everyday by sunrise and watched some of the most beautiful pink, orange, and yellow dawns.