In this painting, I wanted to encapsulate the spirit of the song “Lift Us Up” that I had written as the forces of darkness had begun to take hold of us in America.

“Shannon” was my first effort after not having painted for many decades.

This was the first totally nonobjective thinking that I created since I started painting again. It was in some ways the most satisfying and most challenging painting then I'm done since “Shannon".

While I was still in the wilderness supporting Christopher, I decided to paint a larger portrait of sorts of “Grandpa Jerry”.

This is another painting, like "The Shaman" that is somewhat expressionistic in that it is not what I am seeing that I am interpreting but what I am feeling about the subject that guides what I paint.

I was with Christopher on a retreat that's part of his spiritual practice in the Native American tradition.

This is just an expressionistic way of my characterizing what is visible but also what is hidden, sometimes because we wish that to be so, in our lives.

To get my bearings when I was joining Christopher on his spiritual retreat, I sat down to paint the spirit of the place in which we would be surrounded when we took our meals and shared our thoughts about those were living the Native American rituals that brought them there.

Joyful Chaos is the cousin of “Celebration" but it was created when I was an entirely different mood with a great deal of of humor in my mind and heart as I was painting it.

My granddaughter Valentina came to the house and instead of wanting to have a guitar lesson she said "I want to paint!" I took out my magic markers and set us both up with a still life in front of us.