Artist Statement
The paintings, ‘Crossroads River’, ‘The Birth’ and ‘The Baptism’ are from a collection of 25 paintings called “Internal Landscapes” that I painted from 1991 to the present and are kind of a personal journey of my internal life; a visual internal diary. The sojourner in the paintings is me.

My physical ”transsexual status” didn’t come into actuality until 2005. But for many years prior to that I saw myself as a hermaphrodite or an androgynous being. When I was putting myself into the landscapes, I couldn’t make a choice between which gender I wanted to be because I felt like I would be telling a lie, not being honest about my full self.

‘Crossroads River’ is one of the last paintings I did before transitioning (i.e. starting on hormones). It represents that moment of decision making: Am I going to do this, am I going to allow myself to jump off into the unknown without having a net to catch me, not knowing what’s going to happen? You have no way of knowing what’s going to happen when you transition.

‘The Birth’ is making the statement that I can be born again. The earth is cracking open and this huge fully formed figure is coming out; it’s muscular and it’s powerful and at the same time, it’s cradled in this fetal like position. And these hands pulling the earth back are a symbol of my deliberateness-- this is a willful act of self creation.

Prior to transitioning, I was really worried about my connection with spirit and my connection ancestrally. ‘The Baptism’ is about my acceptance of who I am spiritually. The main theme is saying that in some places in this life you won’t have any reflection of your self at all and you have to have a reservoir of something upon which to make decisions and my decisions always fall back to spirit. Also, at this point, I and my figures aren’t androgynous any more; they’re male.

‘The War Series’ of paintings came out of my therapeutic process, exploring some of the feelings that I’ve had since transitioning about my upbringing, my ostracization and how isolating that can be. I didn’t really want to paint scenes from my past; it was just too much and so I started thinking about the feeling of isolation and that led me to the idea of war and detainment; how people are separated from the group and tortured. After having done the “Internal Landscapes,” I wanted to manifest this narrative in as simple a language as possible compositionally-- big shapes, shadow figures that represented the lack of identity, isolation and gestures that would invoke a feeling of dread.

I was working on ‘The War Series’ and ‘Transcendental: The Adventures of Dicky and Clitti’ simultaneously. Whereas ‘The War Series ‘is more my personal internal struggle with identity and with isolation, ‘Dicky and Clitti’ was a way for me to relieve myself of the heaviness and to participate in something that was already being lived. It was a way to say: I’m here, I’ve arrived and I’m able to draw myself whereas before I never drew myself. And I just want to tell this great, amusing, not too serious story about a couple that meet and about trans reality.

And that brings us to ‘The Portrait Series,' which came out of my desire to create a series of portraits of Transgendered Men and to document their identity and their everydayness, their regularity in life. The goal was to create a reflection for myself so I could have something to look at and weigh my existence against, like I’m not the only one and not only am I not the only but there are so many of us in all shapes and sizes and colors and moods and temperaments. So to me these portraits are a way of acknowledging a community that is very powerful, very beautiful and very self determined.