The Body Remembers I
Acrylic gel-press monoprint (1/3 Varied Edition1). 5 x 7 in. 2026.

Why the fish?

Fish have shown up a lot in my work, although maybe not so much in work that I’ve shared. I assure you it has nothing to do with fishing. Or with “fishers of men”, as they say. Just fish. As in that vast universe of creatures living in the sea, or rivers or lakes or even little puddles, frankly. So foreign to us, yet…not really. Our ancestors crawled out of that same sea, after all. And it is water that we are still, over half of our body weight liquid. We are made up of brine. We are the sea.

The last couple weeks I’ve been in the Four Corners area of the Southwest – “Red Rock Country”, as it’s sometimes called. Southern Utah, northern Arizona. The land of big colored canyons, of eons of sea and marsh and sand dunes all crushed into layers of stone. It’s right in front of you there. Hundreds of millions of years of waters covering the earth, then receding, then covering again. Over and over. And all those finned creatures living their aqueous lives and then dying, turning into limestone or fossils or, of course, just another creature’s lunch.

I can feel them, beneath my feet. Meaning I can feel the time, the millions of years, in the rock and sand beneath my feet. The composition of the Mojave is not the same, perhaps, as the Colorado Plateau, but the time it holds is still beyond our puny reckoning.

I find this comforting. Or maybe a better word is equalizing. It definitely bestows perspective that is a tonic in this moment of upheaval in which we live. But perhaps upheaval is too grand a word, when this moment is not to be compared to a real upheaval like the literal Upheaval Dome in Canyonlands National Park, the result of a collapsing salt dome or possible meteorite impact 60 million years ago. Or the eruption of a new volcano at Sunset Crater just a thousand years ago in Arizona, where ash and lava still blanket the land today.

We are not so grand, really, us humans. We’ll be wiped out like generations of dinosaurs, and like an infinitude of water-living creatures come and gone with those seas, receding and returning and receding again. Or maybe we’ll hang on like the pupfish, just a few lucky dozen nibbling algae off a rock shelf in an ancient puddle.

The Body Remembers I (1/3) monoprint has sold at the Electrons show up for another week at the Glass Outhouse Gallery in Wonder Valley. But there are two more in the edition, in different colorways, and I also made a drypoint edition with a variation of the same design:

The Body Remembers II
1/3 Varied Edition. Acrylic gel-press monoprint. 5 x 7 in. 2026.

These and additional prints and paintings on the homestead theme, as well as photographs by Joe Chaplain and copies of his new album Electrons, are available at the gallery through Saturday May 30. Wed-Fri 1-5 pm, Sat-Sun noon to 5. 77575 Twentynine Palms Highway, Twentynine Palms, CA.

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