The series “love full of life” (2003-2006) was part of the Jackadandy project, a virtual and actual performance project that included the Jackadandy website and a blog that ran from 2005 to 2009 (both now archived).

These small works in pastel came out of an admission of love. I was surprised at the innocence I allowed myself in these paintings, but…such is love…

At that time I’d lived half a century, and I’d watched our world come to a place of danger at a scale and dimension I hadn’t witnessed before. And joy, beauty, kindness…these were the weapons I found in my hands.

I began working with pastels in the mid-1990s. Their gritty, powdery, ground-mineral substance feels right in my desert world. I like their directness, their flexibility, and their linear capacities, as well as their deep color saturation.

I eventually began working the pastels with a brush on sanded paper, which creates a unique, velvety surface. Although I like working larger this technique is more suited to a small format, and I found that the paintings of this series seem right at this more intimate and personal scale. They feel like an invitation, little altars to queer love.

In 1999 three things happened: I moved into my current desert studio, I acquired an extended set of very soft pastels, and I started working on sandpaper. By the end of that year I was manipulating the pigment on the sandpaper with a brush. The small works in this gallery show the evolution of that technique, coming to life in the crucible of the isolation and exposure of my desert studio over the years 2000-2001.

Here in the Mojave desert the dry, gritty, ground-mineral substance of pastels feels appropriate. Their dual draw/paint nature allows me to play among the dimensions, at the illusionary border of line and plane.

I worked in an entirely exploratory manner, without goals or guiding concepts. The desert combines the nakedly geometric with the dynamically organic. My time here has profoundly affected what I am able to see.