Two paintings are leaving the studio this month for the Art in the West exhibition at the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon. The show runs from July 18 through October 2, and these and many other works of art will be auctioned to support the Museum and its programs.  DNA and Little White Dove are two very different paintings, but ones I am proud to send out into the world together.

DNA

Two ravens share a branch, one calling upward, feathers ruffled with urgency; the other silent and listening below. The exchange between them is charged with something that feels both like instinct and thought.

But the painting holds a second message. The arc of the branch, the opposing postures of the birds, the spiral of the composition itself - all echo the double helix, that elegant, coiled architecture at the center of every living thing. Ravens mate for life. They grieve, remember, and reason in ways that feel close to our own. It seemed right that they should carry the idea that what binds two creatures together: loyalty, memory, recognition, is not incidental. It is written into the molecule itself.

Little White Dove

The face fills the canvas - close enough that there is nowhere else to look. White fur, warm with ochre and shadow, horns curved against a subdued gray ground, and two dark eyes that hold nothing you could name and everything you can feel. This animal is not performing. It simply is.

White bison are rare, and to many Native American peoples, sacred. I painted this with the full weight of what that means: what was taken from the bison, and from the people whose lives and cultures were bound to them, by people who looked like me. I arrived two centuries too late to have had any part in it, but that doesn't help. Some things you inherit whether you chose to or not, and that inheritance sits in this work.

If you are in or traveling through the Bend area this summer, I hope you will stop in. The High Desert Museum is a remarkable place, and I would love for these paintings to be seen by people who love that country as much as I do.