Me and My Ghosts
I am conjuring spirit characters that embody the notion of multigenerational trauma and the ghostly qualities of mental health issues we unwittingly inherit from our ancestors. Right before my eyes, my ghosts reach through the work with a writhing hand jive that shakes my ancient family tree from crown to root, where both confederates and nazis have nested. My spirits recall the Hungry Ghosts of ancient Buddhist lore, who wander a parallel world addicted and afflicted with insatiable desire. After years of filing my ghosts away, I am now coaxing them out of my body during working seances, looking at these spirits for what they are, and listening to their murmurs about my own hungry, clinging hands. My outward practice of self-portraiture is merging with my latent ancestral characters to find lessons in my family "inheritance." While using my work to confront personal ghosts, I have been haunted by the parallels between family systems and the false narratives of colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, where my history dances with our history.

Portraits, 1984-Present 
I have come to use realism as a practice of radical acceptance. People  are a "ready-made" subject matter, everyday vessels of the magical, in-the-flesh palimpsests layered with multitudes of stories. Making portraits forces me to ask myself what exactly makes a person a person, and to study the subtleties that dissolve the unjustified generalities imposed upon groups of people. For several thousand years portraiture has brought the dead back to life and heightened the living. Across the millennia, we lock eyes with the regal gaze of a noblewoman from an Egyptian sarcophagus and wonder what her days were like. Ludwig Meidner’s foreboding self-portrait "My Night Visage" enables us to feel Europe’s psychic earthquake on the eve of The Great War. Rembrandt's lifetime of self-portraiture treats us to the unflinching scrutiny of a human face as it absorbs the unpredictable passage of time. As long as the work stays intact, it hands us our ticket to immortality, whispering across time, “Look at me, this is the way I was.” 

The Year of the Virus: Selected Drawings, 2020
My sketchbook has kept me alive during the pandemic. I have turned to the mirror to check in with myself and used photos to have imaginary portrait sessions with missed friends, distant heroes, and even the monsters who are riding all the rotten chickens coming home to roost.  

Waiting to Go Home, 2007
I have been building fires for my father this winter. I have also been doing portraits of my dad as he sits and watches the fires. He is living and leaving this life with Alzheimer’s disease, a condition that slowly but surely erases parts of him before our very eyes. The painting sessions last about two hours a day. He sits with his feet up under a cozy blanket in his den of thirty-three years but does not recognize it as his house. Every once in a while he asks my mom, “When are we gonna go home?” Doing these laptop gouache portraits has allowed me to connect with my dad at a time when his connection to his family and the objects in his universe is slowly fading away. This is my way of keeping him alive as long as I possibly can. This little series of drawings and paintings turns the quiet, private moments of our winter, his winter, into a reverberating, public experience. My dad was fearless in the arms of the public he no longer engages. He was the life of the party without even having to don a lamp shade. He was gregarious and robust, and sometimes acted like a bear. Now he sits, still, silent, and solemn, in front of the fires watching, waiting to “go home.”
January, 2007
Check out my book, Waiting to Go Home:
www.blurb.com/b/4061156

My Old Man and the Sea, 2010-14
Here I explore the archetype of the pirate, the reckless adventurer who battles monsters on the high seas of my subconscious.

A Fool's Paradise, 2005-09
Of all the characters in my personal pantheon, it is the archetype of the clown that I embody to tell the human story. Clowns can be sinister and sweet, ridiculous and sublime, angelic and demonic, moving fluidly across the gender spectrum. The clown's dualities allow them to inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously. He can turn himself into a stranger. She shape-shifts to deflect the severity of life and defends herself by hurling giggles at monsters. Clowns have come to represent our highest aspirations of freedom and creativity as well as walk us into the darkest debacles. The sinuous roadmap of the clown, which has as its destination self-awareness, is marked with many detours of deception. I have chosen the fool's way. Merrily, merrily, I trip over my own whimsy. Blown by the wind I often surface in uncharted territory. I disregard the glaring warning signs and step into the riptide. I get pulled under and tumble down, down, down into the rabbit hole, over the meadow and through the woods, way past grandma's house. I scamper and skip over the top, under the radar, right to the edge, up a creek, through the looking glass, and into the parade. I whistle through the graveyard and dance with death. I belly up to the bacchanal, have fifteen more drinks than necessary, and awake right smack dab in the middle of a matted maze that is myself. Not quite heaven or hell, limbo is my station.

La Antigua, 1995-2000
La Antigua, a work of fictional imagery grounded in personal experience, is my very own “going-up-river” story. As well as reconstructing a place and its consciousness, its façade and its deeper truth, La Antigua is an illustration of a picaresque adventure: the chronicle of a subject’s seduction, abandonment, and resurfacing in a space where new rules had to be learned to survive. The multi-layered world of La Antigua reaches the spectator through three narrative forms: drawings and paintings, an eight-by-twelve foot “wall-map” of the magical, gulf-coast village, and two dozen larger-than-life painted, plywood figures—a cast of characters that walk right out of the drawings and paintings to mingle with gallery visitors. The intangible yet monstrously dense force of the village constantly tugged on the will of its inhabitants. The façade of La Antigua was a paradise begging to be possessed. The colonial town, which had been the stage for the return of Quetzacoatl and the violation of pre-Hispanic Mexico, offered up a gamut of experiences one would ordinarily reserve for fiction. That which initially beckoned to be possessed turned the tables and ultimately wound up possessing me. Come with me to the fertile site of rotting papaya, mango, and zapote, where witchcraft merges with Jean-Claude Van Damme movies via Sony televisions glowing from tiny shacks, where the ghosts of the conqueror and his concubine pull the marionette strings and where the horny humidity seeps into the relentless, intoxicating rumble of the marimba down by the river. Leave your free will on shore and let yourself get pulled under by the riptide of La Antigua.

Frutas, 1991
"His still lives have a singular charm. They are confidential pairs or groups of fruit that seem to sustain a secret dialogue, perhaps romantic, in an intimacy never disturbed by the human presence. The bananas, mangos, melons and papayas reveal naked, juicy portions of flesh glowing with light. The smiling sensuality that emanates from the subjects accentuates the luminous atmosphere, infused with a delicious and gentle eroticism, of these sunny watercolors."
 Sylvia Navarrete, Mexico City, 1991