Back	The "Homage to Building" series is a chronicle of the year spent building our studio. We began the foundation in October, 1992, moved into our studio at the end of March, 1993, and applied the first stucco in October. Most of the work was done by Dave Nietsen and myself; Maureen did the spackling and the painting. The leftover materials from the building, my working clothes, and the scraps from the screen tent that was our kitchen during the months we were living in a tent so that we could afford to build, became the materials for this series of painting. Along with these materials, I used the soil from different parts of our land and leaf mulch from under our trees to add earth colors to my paintings. My task was to combine these diverse materials to create aesthetic wholes, non- representational abstractions that transcend their material base to represent the process of building, and the process of living during the time we were building. Consequently, the paintings incorporate the uncertainty, the instability, the dynamics of the project, and the chaos inherent in throwing our lives outdoors, outside the comforts of shelter and society, in order to do something we could never really afford to do with the normal means of hiring professionals to do the work. So this series reflects the anxiety of our living situation and the anxiety of building our own house. All of this disequilibrium is resolved visually in the different paintings of this series, but maintaining the edge that the process of building gave to our lives. What gives this series its coherence is the intentionality behind the process. The process which began by leaving our "good" jobs in New York City and moving to Santa Fe, the two-year search for and buying of land, then the moving out our apartment into a tent and putting all our things into storage so that we could afford to start building. This risk-taking and the jumping off into the unknown void became the thesis of my series of paintings. Is it possible, like improvisation in jazz, to just begin and then create the path white you are in the process of traveling it? Yes, it is possible to incorporate improvisation into painting and into living your life. But you really have to want to do it, and you need the trust and love of those who come along with you when you fall apart as often as I regularly do. At the bottom of what makes this all possible is the love Maureen and I share, the love for life for each other, for openness in both emotions and in space, and the love for creating. This love makes me want to paint.