The “Darwin Panels” are the results of testing gilding techniques and experimenting with design ideas that are ultimately incorporated into my endangered species gilded panel paintings or used for the 'Thinking Inside the Box' series.

​It is an appropriate name for the trial and error process playing out on each “Darwin Panel” as the physical realities of the medium dictate design. As ideas evolve, only the strongest survive to be used in more sophisticated work.

“It's all connected” should be the battle cry in support of the global environment. Nature, all living beings and systems are interdependent and connected in an ever evolving web of life—this is the original “internet”.

​The survival of each animal and plant species holds the key to healthy ecosystems and ultimately to human survival. ​

Clocks are a reminder of nature’s cycles, while maps represent a frozen moment in time. When used together in a painting about our compromised environment, the symbolism of a clock can imply that time is running out.

​I use maps, accurate and fantasy, to call attention to the affects of climate change as glaciers melt and land masses are altered at an unnatural and accelerated rate.

Art has always been a way for mankind to connect with nature, an attempt to understand its mystery and beauty, to borrow its power. Artist’s earliest primal symbols show a desire to acknowledge the critical role animals played in human survival.

A wooden panel is covered with several layers of gesso (a mixture of chalk and animal hyde glue) and then painted with bole (a naturally occurring clay mixed with glue) before sheets of gold leaf are applied and burnished with an agate stone to produce a reflective surface.

Factories with billowing smoke have always fascinated me. Symbolically, they represent our ability to alter natural landscapes while consuming raw materials, in my work, they represent manmade pollution.

Industrial landscapes provide an opportunity to edit architecture with atmosphere while creating images that look familiar but are total fantasy. Using gold and copper leaf between layers of transparent oil paint creates an optic not achievable with direct painting--my goal is to sensitize the viewer into acknowledging the good and bad side of industry --to consider how modern consumption patterns have a direct effect on the natural world.

After reading that it takes 1,860 gallons of water to produce one pound of edible beef, I started painting cows from a series of photographs I had taken at a county fair. As I made studies, the lineup of black and white Holstein cows began to look like a map, and as I kept painting, a high horizon line emerged.

​This lead me to think of them as “Map Falls”—meaning that the map is changing and it looked like water was “falling” over the edge of the earth. It made me think of water from glacier melting, pouring into the oceans and changing the shape of every coast line with higher sea levels. The most recent paintings are called “Global Warming, Global Melt”, some showing the world as we know it and others anticipate a global map that is unrecognizable.

The boxes are wood covered with chalky gesso and adorned with gold leaf, bole, graphite, watercolor, oil paint, ink, screws, beads, recycled spools, and copper wire; they are made from the most precious and the most ordinary materials.

​They call attention to our compromised environment and endangered species through the use of ancient gilding techniques that are on the verge of being lost or forgotten in our high-tech age. The rare medium lends poetry to the message about fragile ecosystems and vanishing species.

“Malthusian” refers to Thomas Malthus’ (1766-1834) theory of over-population and its dire consequences in relationship to feeding an ever-expanding world population. In 1988, I had a series of vivid dreams where throngs of people replaced cars on roads and endless crowds moved as a human herd.

​To deal with the anxiety, I started photographing people during rush hour to use as a reference for my first “Malthusian Paintings”. These canvases are crowded with moving figures, often faceless but somehow connected in their shared kaleidoscopic pattern of light and shadow.

​Using old master’s oil glazing techniques and embracing the “moving” aspect of the figures, the canvases capture passages of abstraction embedded within realistically structured compositions.