I feel strange. This trip to Taos really shook me up in a lot of ways. Santa Fe has been the third largest art market for years, but now it is a toss up between Taos....and the art has become so....slick! It is absolute perfection to the point where you can't even notice a brush stroke. I think the pendulum that swung to such a degree of abstraction with Pollack is swinging towards a degree of technical perfection never seen before. I also think it is a reaction to this horrible war that we are in....

This government uses a weapon of mass destruction called fear so successuflly, and though it says that it supports our First Amendment rights of Free Speech it has done everything it can to quiet the artistic community. It has gutted the National Endowment For The Arts, other grant institutions, and it would love to shut NPR down once and for all. Why do I bring this up? Because I had two people walk into my booth telling me that art is dead, and I need to switch to digital. Now I love digital art...I absolutely love what can be done, and I totally support it, because it is a new media in our age....but ART IS NOT DEAD!

To prove my point, let me share something I saw....I saw this wonderful news piece on NBC Nightly News a few weeks ago on the artists in Iraq. They refuse to give in. They are out on the streets painting murals even though their lives are in danger. The symphony is still playing, even though they fear to be seen carrying their instruments...and there is this wonderful man who refuses to close his gallery despite he is in one of the most embattled areas of Iraq and has received numerous death threats. They refuse to give in...they believe in art, and art is what will guide them all to a better place rather than the mess that this country has created for them. They amaze me...they inspire me...they are so courageous...they are rebuilding their communities through art.

In Philadelphia a woman started a mural project there. She went around asking the Graffiti artists to start painting murals in the neighborhoods instead of graffiti. Guess what? This simple act of painting these amazingly, beautiful murals has revitalized once drug ravaged communities! Art is not dead....art is alive...it has been the source of communicating emotions that words could never describe since we could pick up something that could make a mark. It unites communities...it heals...it brings people's hearts' back to life!

Three people told me that they felt sorry for me at my booth...because I was painting from my heart and that just isn't the way anymore. One beautiful woman was really touched by my work and gave me a huge hug. Thank you....maybe it is time for that pendulum to swing the other way...back towards the middle. Buddha tried the extremes at both ends of the pendulum and neither worked...until he found the Middle Way...well, maybe the Middle Way in artwork is everything! Everything is accepted...all forms of creation....painting from the heart isn't something to be scared of in these scarey times...In fact, I think it is imperative that artists paint from their heart, from their souls, instead of thinking of what to paint that will sell...because it will wake people up! It will set us free...create a space where we can begin dreaming ourselves out of this chaos into a new dream and create a more harmonious world community.

"Learn the rules, and then figure out which ones to break." Fritz Scholder

This is a painting I did for the Save Darfur organization. They were going to auction it off, but there was a change in personnel and it all fell through. This is called Bloody Tears. It is of a man in Darfur who had his eyes stabbed with a bayonet by the Janjaweed. His face haunted me for weeks, and I still think about him everyday...wondering how he is...did he survive any possible infections, and that last image of horror he saw before it all went dark. I pray that his imagination brings more beautiful images into his beautiful mind...