Field Notes

A working scrapbook of images, notes, and fragments gathered over decades—pieces of memory, curiosity, and observation that continue to surface as I revisit a life in art.

You can spend days on a painting and still know it isn’t right.
The problem isn’t the time.
It’s letting go of what you thought was good.

I came across a statement I wrote in 1983 during my MFA at Iowa, shortly after interviewing Buckminster Fuller. Reading it now, I can see both the influence and the idealism. Some of it feels naive. Some of it still feels like a direction I haven’t let go of.

After creating 17 songs with the AI music tool Suno, I reflect on authorship, creativity, and the lingering question: does writing songs with artificial intelligence make me a musician?

A short piece written after running the Bay to Breakers in San Francisco on May 17, 1987. What began as a race quickly revealed itself as something closer to street theater—part carnival, part political satire, and entirely San Francisco.

Earlier this year, I applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship.What I didn’t anticipate was how much the application process would demand personally. I revisited more than 40 years of work. Slides. Early digital manipulations. Paintings. Mixed media. Thousands of images I hadn’t seen in decades.

One of my earliest published pieces, written for the John Deere Journal in 1974, long before I imagined a life centered on art. Even then I was drawn to questions about what motivates people to work, think, and persist—questions that still echo through my photography and painting.

A reflection on painting as a process of chaos, discovery, and restraint—where the artist begins in wild motion and gradually learns to listen to what the canvas is trying to become.

For an artist, there’s nothing as daunting yet exciting as facing a blank canvas. The possibilities are infinite; and so are the risks. My approach is to simply make some brush strokes or marks or splashes of paint and see what that triggers. I try to keep the process an in-the-moment improv dance between eye, […]

A studio reflection on painting as a kind of sparring match—testing ideas, throwing paint like punches, and staying alert for the unexpected moment when the canvas reveals something new.