You can't see anything from a car…. You've got to… walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus.

--- Edward Abby

We have been asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mocking bird on the chimney is singing. If the mocking bird were chirping to give us the long-sought formula for a unified field theory, the point would be only slightly less irrelevant. The real and proper question is: Why is it so beautiful? "…Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code. And it could be that for beauty, as it turned out to be for French, that there is no key, that ‘oui' will never make sense in our language but only in its own, and that we need to start all over again, on a new continent, learning the strange syllables one by one.” ---Annie Dillard

I read that in the laundromat as I waited for my clothes to finish the spin cycle and it has sat pounding around in my head since. It was a new Rosetta Stone. I thought I understood the river pretty well since I've spent so much time with it - I started paddling down rivers when I was 13. But the more I see it from different angles, with different eyes than a paddler, the more I realize I am only understanding the river at the level of the infant who botches speech utterly. I have found that new continent right in my own backyard and am now spending my days trying to learn the strange syllables of the river one by one.

My work is shaped by the river; its transparencies, shifting color and movement. Layered surfaces are built slowly by brushing. Shapes are created by rubbing and sanding, dripping and dragging. My work shifts and changes as the rivers shift and change over time and in cycles. I create images with paint, a camera and words to magnify the subtlties of river environments in constant flux.