Two years ago I bought a map, put my dog in the truck and headed north. This was the first of several road trips up through the eastern grasslands of Colorado catching the Platte River at Sterling, Colorado and following it via the old highways through the Great Plains to Central Nebraska, the location of the great bird migrations, then on to Plattsmouth where the Platte River converges with the Missouri. I had been granted a sabbatical to create a series of paintings based on my return to the Midwest. Since settling in New Mexico my life had changed drastically; most of the books in my reading stack now concerned the history of the West both as a place and a concept. I had grown up in Nebraska but I had never really experienced it as a landmass with a unique history of its own. Truthfully while living in Nebraska, I seldom strayed outside of Omaha or Lincoln. I am not a landscape painter, so I wasn't sure how I was going to document this trip, I only knew that I wanted to go back and take a look at something very special that somehow I overlooked earlier in life. It was remarkable, but only the beginning. A few weeks after returning home from my final trip, I ended up hospitalized in a coma with the bubonic plague. My organs were failing and my body dying, but, that other part of me was off traveling the world, eventually returning to the Great Plains, the Platte River, and the sand cranes. I was battling life and death not in my hospital room but in the Manzano Mountains in New Mexico and in the endless yellow winter fields of Nebraska. The paintings that have emerged are about my connectedness to place and family, to past and present, and a certain continuance through time and place. My illness brought about the partial amputation of my hands and feet. These paintings also and maybe more importantly, document my sense of awkwardness of gesture and movement that I feel as I learn to renegotiate my body. I don’t have much left of my hands but somehow they manage to paint. Maybe after all these years painting is all they know. They seem to forget their dismemberment and out of the simple need to lay paint they proceed and begin again.