“Hush” Jardin do Amor/Love Garden Series 2017-2019 Mixed-medium inks, acrylics, collage, glitter, gloss varnish. Diptych produced on (2) 37”w x 52” birch plywood panels. Total dimensions 74”w x 52”h.

For the last five years I have maintained a prolific studio practice on a 120 acre horse ranch near Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, producing imaginative portraitures of pensive women; creating playfully expressionist landscapes filled with exotic birds and flora; and making contemporary still-lifes inspired by Japanese flower arranging (Ikebana) and 17th century Dutch “Stillevens” painting.

Beyond formalist considerations of composition, my art is most profoundly informed by intuition, improvisation, and the exuberance of process. Thematically, the titles of the art suggest poignant stories untold within the environment of each work. Contextually the art reflects my love of travel, poetry, art history and language as well as my meditative considerations on Art & Nature, Art & Women, Art & Ethnicity, and Cultural Aesthetics in Contemporary society.

The Garden as a metaphor has been a recurring motif in my art over the last several years since my first trip to Brazil in 2012, and again in 2015 via The O. Gail Poole Travel Award from the Norman Arts Council. My stay included extended visits to the Botanical Gardens in Rio de Janeiro, a city which continues to inspire much of the theatricality, the dynamism, and sensuality energizing my art.

In the painting ‘Hush’, the viewer steps into what Oklahoma Art Writing & Curatorial Fellow John Selvidge describes as “the verdant environment of an ecstatically dense, but balanced composition of seemingly chaotic arrangements. Birds are positioned as witnesses or pure potentiality at rest, holding the viewer with their gaze in a suspended moment of easeful tension.”

Emergent abstracted plant forms erupt with blooms of color, contrasted against the loamy bed of black that serves as the grounding for the work. Hidden along the edge of the river and entangled in the thick growth is a mysterious figure looking back at us. Is she hiding quiet from a lurking danger? Is she hiding in refuge, waiting for the signal to run? Is she waiting for the whistle of her secret lover? Everything you can imagine is real.

Selvidge considers that, “Re-contextualized in terms of ecological, psychological and metaphysical urgency, ‘Hush’ can be read as a call to conscience through the dark overgrown landscapes of our quiet fears and fragile hopes. The work is an invitation to follow the path through the Garden, to find our way back home.”

-quotes from John Selvidge’s critical review and essay, ‘Figure and Ground: Douglas Shaw Elder and Skip Hill’s Melrose Sessions’ Art Focus Oklahoma, Oklahoma Art Writing & Curatorial Fellowship, Vol.34 Number 1, Summer 2019