In December, 2016 President Obama signed a bill that designated 1.35+ million acres of San Juan County, Utah as Bears Ears National Monument. It was an epic gesture for the preservation of a great American wilderness area, but the celebration of this monument was short lived. A year later the next president, with the urging of Utah politicians and extractive energy companies, reduced the size of the monument by 85%. This lack of concern and respect for the five native tribes that share heritage with the area and the total disregard for the wealth of prehistoric habitation sites in my opinion is a crime against humanity. Regardless of the lines drawn on the current map, Bears Ears territory is an immense piece of the Colorado Plateau that will outlive all modes of humanity.
I have spent thirty years in Bears Ears territory and hiked thousands of miles searching for outrageous landscapes and investigating the copious diary of human occupation. The high desert has never failed me. To describe this territory and my connection to it in ways often too special for words is through images and paintings. When I gaze out of my office window, I see an immense wall of sandstone cliffs that compose the southeast border of the ‘original’ monument. Observing this desert landscape is part of my daily routine. It is an extension of my being and the reason I chose to live where I live.
The bulk of my artistic output for the past three decades has focused on some aspect of Bears Ears. Countless photographs and over sixteen hundred paintings have been inspired by this special place. This ‘official’ series of paintings began shortly after the designation of the monument. As of this writing they number over ninety paintings and counting. What started as a semi-realistic interpretation of the landscape evolved into an abstraction of the natural elements, prehistoric sites and my connection with each. The objective of this exploration is to allow the work to evolve through various interpretations until I reach the quintessence of Bears Ears on canvas. It was during the making of the pieces numbered in the seventy-plus range that I felt the work develop a life of its own. The elements and long hours started to come to fruition. Where it goes…nobody knows, including the artist.
The paintings themselves incorporate a variety of media including two hundred million year old Chinle Clay. The heavily textured pieces reflect the rugged canyon country of Bears Ears territory. The elements of wind, sun, rain, drought, clouds and the sandstone canyons themselves influence the raw, tactile feel of these paintings. The pervasive enigma of prehistory… what they left for us to ponder…. is a core tenet in this series of paintings.
The new satellite studio near the town of Eastland, Utah gives me another visual perspective of Bears Ears country. It lies approximately eighty miles north of Bluff and three thousand feet higher in elevation. From this vantage point I can see the Abajo Mountains and Bears Ears Buttes. It is my mission to engage in a series of large scale paintings at this new studio that will add another dimension to this series.
