For two years and four months(4/2020-8/2022),I dragged myself and a mountain worth of equipment to the top of the Santa Monica mountains overlooking Corral Canyon and its sandstone rimmed spine dipping into the pacific.The painting itself was built from six 32x48”canvas covered wood panels, measuring a total of 66x144”,and painted strictly onsite, supported(lengthwise)by an SUV, and lot of paracord.

Initially the project came from a knee-jerk reaction to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus and the need to distance myself from the anxiety of being part of public life. Perched high above the Pacific ocean where the act of painting was to be an act of preservation, focusing on the wonder of the natural world became instead a tuning fork for peripheral existential thought lying just outside a longstanding scripted worldview. Pragmatically quieted by the business of “normal” life, challenging perspectives and philosophies deemed as “blindness” to those of childhood beliefs, finally found the space and oxygen to open up and consider at length. In all truthfulness, my personal outlook on life and its perceived order (part of or apart from religious thought) is still unsettled and indefinite, which is a challenging space to occupy.

My mountain top hiatus opened something up inside, leaving me alone with my thoughts, it cleared the air of preconceptions and challenged my philosophy, allowing new optimistic vistas to come to perspective, full of new possibilities of what life can be.

*If I could boast of anything, it would be at the very least that my artwork will always stand outside broad sweeping genres (representational, plein air, direct observation, etc.) because (despite appearances) I’m not painting what I see any longer (it’s just not useful to me now), but rather concentrating on physical objects to be fulcrums which will be used to challenge how I see.

*The Corral Canyon Chromatic painting for all practical purposes, is a beautiful residual artifact of a time of tremendous change.