Loyal Soldiers

                                    Pauline Aspel's apple tree May, 1978, Iowa City, Iowa

I am looking to fully live my multifaceted, wild psyche, committing myself to the largest story I am capable of living, serving something bigger than myself….daring to dream the impossible and to romance the world, to feel and honor my kinship with all species and habitats, to embrace the troubling wisdom of paradox, and to shape myself into perhaps, a student of the visionary, with the artistry and the energy to revitalize our enchanted and endangered world.

what did i know of this longing when i was just 20 years old? in my memory, this was the time that i first believed i had found a language that expressed without words, the deeper aspects of my knowing. this would have been when i was in college and first was introduced to black and white photography and the alchemical wonder of the latent image revealing itself to me in the developer bath in the dim red light. what i don’t remember is when or why i understood that images were safer than words to explore this mystery, these mysteries, within my self and within the wider world? it was in these early days that i began to be drawn to symbols and ultimately to the meaning of these symbols as i later, in graduate school in new york, began to pair elements within the frame in a controlled environment, still lives. Still Lives. I wasn’t finding these ideas in the world around me so I began to create these worlds in small tableauxs.

                                     Altar Piece, 1987, New York, New York, (29 years old)

                                                                1987/88, 23rd Street, NYC