“The world concerns me ... because I have walked on this earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude I want to leave some souvenir.” 

– Vincent Van Gogh

My own work follows suit – always emotional, full of my person – in short, it is the evidence of my path.

...As I once flippantly told a reporter “Livin’ ain’t no hobby, and I ain’t no tole painting.”   I have always been fascinated by "the other" -- the outsider -- specifically those who exist outside my own realm of experience. Growing up in Oklahoma, the native-American Pow-Wow was my first exposure to the grandeur of “the other.”  As a teenager, this fascination expanded with my choosing to “cross the tracks” and attend the countries’ first voluntarily integrated high school, Booker T. Washington.

My own history and fascination with Native and African American cultures has lead me to collect ethnographic art from around the world;  and this obsession has taken me to places like Bali and Mexico. Bali is a magical place where the act of making objects is revered as a divine act (a way to worship in a sense).  Everyone in Bali makes something whether it is paintings or sculptures, or daily offerings and household objects of immense beauty.  Similarly,  in Mexico, we find art that also moves beyond mere decoration, but is embedded deeply within the culture via customs and traditions such as those exhibited via Dia De Los Muertos.  

 
As an art teacher and service learning coordinator at Hoboken Charter School, i.e., an inclusion  school  where one-third of my students are “learning challenged” – many of my kids are “outsiders” themselves, and my appreciation of/for these kids gives credence and encouragement to their art-making, and in turn, their art-making feeds my own “vision.”  Like the Balinese,  I believe that everyone can create and contribute -- thus, I teach my kids to use their art to give back to the world... And I strive to do the same with my actions and images.

A few years back, by the grace of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, I was able to travel across the U.S. as a teaching fellow on a self-charted pilgrimage to meet many of the visionary artists that I admire, including: Charles Gillam, Vollis Simpson, Matt Sesow, Mose Tolliver, and several others.  Struck by their passion, often times coupled with their bravado, I have found these artists to be “true artists” because most make art for no other reason than the act of making itself. Some may call it therapy.   Or vanity.   Or compulsion.   Or simply hobby.   While others might go as far as to label it as religion.  I choose the term “visionary” to address artists who work and produce in this manner.   AND the connection that I have found with each of these artists is this: each faced a “crossroads experience” in their lives that prompted their art-making – incidents ranging from incest and rape, to immense loss or impending death, and this kind of history (and events) are what have provoked and propelled my own art making.   I approach my journey as an artist/poet/educator, like a child with a keen sense of wonder and well honed suspension of disbelief.

My work is about Wonder -- and attempts to find beauty in the callous and often times unsophisticated things in and of our world. My images take on the unexplainable  (i.e. the magic and the chaos) of our existence, attempting to produce some sense of understanding,    no matter how simplistic or primitive.
 
My newest body of work, the Insider-R-Out series is inspired by outsider artists like Clyde Jones of Bynam, NC  (who I had the privilege of meeting)...   Clyde is a delightfully colorful character who speaks his truth without reservation, and as if he has a mouth full of marbles. One of his carved critters hangs over the Bynam general store where guys actually play checkers over a barrel like something from a Carson McCullers’  novella.   His carvings are scattered about town as he chooses to give his work away to people he likes (which I can identify with)...   He told me that “I like everybody. I like you just like I liked that fancy Russian dancer.”    He was referring to Baryshnikov, who as a connoisseur of folk art, once visited Clyde...      

 
From Clyde’s  “Critter Crossing” I traveled on Greyhound to Montgomery, Alabama, where it felt as if everyone had left at the time of the bus boycotts of the sixties and never returned  –  it was a ghost town!   There I retraced the steps of Bill Traylor,  an outsider artist (now of great prominence) who had been born into slavery. Unable to read or write, he began drawing and painting at the age of eighty-three upon the death of his beloved wife.   Lost without her he became homeless and shined shoes for money, sleeping in the back of a funeral parlor on rainy nights.  Traylor’s works are now housed in the nation’s finest museums and bring in top dollar at auction; but like another famed  “outsider artist”  Vincent VanGogh, he never saw that kind of success (or money) in his lifetime!

So, by teaching my kids about folk legends like Traylor,  who was homeless,  I am also able to teach them about advocacy and giving back – i.e., the individual making a difference  –  while hopefully providing a greater understanding of those who exist on the fringes of our society. 

My kids learn about art not just as pretty pictures, but as an outlet  (or saving grace),  as a connection to our roots and culture,  and something that feeds our humanity through ritual and even service.

...AND this philosophy has lead to the creation of an organization we call AGGG!!!  AKA - Art of Greater Gravity and Giving, where my kids work on projects that support the local homeless shelter,  http://www.hobokenshelter.org , and other charities like the Oaks Indian Mission. http://www.oaksindianmission.org in Anadarko, Oklahoma (an orphanage) that I worked with as a youth.

In the process, my own art has come full circle, having moved from and through many cycles.  It has been dark and self-referential,  then curiously abstract, and more recently,  charged with ethnographic imagery  --  to the quirkiness of present works that speak to my own awareness of topics  ranging  from politics to literature, while giving a nod to the styles and intensity of the outsider artists that I find so engaging.   Meanwhile, the creation of AGGG!!! and  my ongoing work with my students has been likened by art critics to that of Tim Rollins and KOS (Kids of Survival), but with a humanitarian spin where art feeds the collective spirit.
 
My earlier work dealt with my having been abused as a child, and my painting and performances often mourned the losses of friends to AIDS.  The skull images in my paintings served as the container for the brain, thus holding memory and history.

...With the help of a Balinese shaman and a Hindu priestess who preformed a purification on me, my work now speaks from the heart and not the head.  My visual art (and poetry)  no longer mourn the loss of life or sadness of friends and family passing; but instead celebrate(s) life, dancing  in gratitude for the love that has transpired.  While earlier works often times scratched through dark grounds to reveal color as a metaphor for hope, the color now brazenly steps to the forefront.

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever”; and this is why I chose to “make” and to teach (thus share) as evidence of that philosophy.  My choice is to create,  not to destroy,  to protect children in ways that I was not, and to show the world that I am grateful for everything and everyone in it!