Cow Skull

For a long time, I've been fascinated with animal bones and skulls. I love the symmetry; I love thinking about the living creature that inhabited the bones, and I like to think about what its life was like. In this image especially, I wanted to explore the shape of the bones, and give the feeling of past/future cycles. A friend and his partner happened to have a cow skull in their backyard, so I made a date to go spend an afternoon painting outside with him.

This was definitely inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe's cow skulls. She was one of the first artists to really inspire me, and I feel a strong connection to her work. I just love the way that she meshes reality with the sublime, there are so many ways to read her art. Her work is almost spiritual in its blending of realism and the (almost) surreal.

I was also inspired by a painting that I saw a long time ago at the San Diego Museum of Art, "After Many Days" by Thomas Hart Benton. It was hanging in the gallery on one of my first trips there, and this was one of the few paintings that really stands out in memory. The two tiny horses in the far distant background add so much to the story. Were they owned by the former inhabitant of the skull? Did he or she die while riding? Was this the person's farm? Who or what killed the person?

I love the idea of nature taking over again, and bodies (human or animal) feeding the earth, growing new life out of what has passed. Maybe that's why I love ghost towns and abandoned buildings so much also. The idea of our temporary existence is terrifying and beautiful all at once. We try so hard to control our environment, but eventually nature catches up.

Australian White Ibis

My mom was an ER nurse for 10 years when I was a child, and then she worked as a pre-op/post-op nurse for many years after that. She was born and raised in Western Australia, in a small farm town just northeast of Perth, called Mullewa. Her father was a commercial artist and her mother was a seamstress, but her parents moved away from the city and operated a sheep-shearing ranch before she was born. My mum, the youngest of three children, grew up on the farm, then went to boarding school and later studied nursing. She and a couple of girlfriends were working as nurses and traveling the world when she met my dad in San Diego.

She was very much a healer, and very much someone who loved to take care of her loved ones. She was very nostalgic, but also pragmatic in her beliefs. As a result of her years of nursing training, she knew that tragedy could strike unexpectedly and at any time. She saw families in turmoil when their loved ones passed without instructions about what to do in case of sudden death or serious injury. She was very adamant in her wishes: "If something happens to me, I do not want to be on life support. If I die suddenly, I want to be cremated and have my ashes spread over the farm where I was raised." She said this so often, that there was no doubt what to do when a blood clot hit heart suddenly on December 1, 2006.

The rest of my family and I were in utter turmoil. She was the glue that held us all together. She knew how to fix everything. We were suddenly lost and in more pain than any of us had ever imagined. But we knew what we had to do.

In August 2007, my dad, brother, sister and I boarded a plane in Los Angeles, bound to Sydney before continuing on to Perth the next day. We insisted on carrying our mother's ashes on the plane with us. The TSA tried weakly to say that human remains could not be carried on like that, but we would have none of that. She was not going in the checked luggage, damn it. My dad carried her on the plane and we kept her safe near us.

After 14 hours, we landed in Sydney around 8am. We spent that first day walking around the city, getting acclimated to the continent. We were fractured and injured, in pain and grieving, but we were together and carrying out out mother's greatest wish. We were bringing her home.

This painting was inspired by a photograph that I took that first afternoon in Australia, wandering around a strange continent with my dad, brother and sister. I looked up and saw this beautiful bird in one of the trees and snapped a photo.

Out of much pain, comes art.