This small painting, 8" x 6", was made with watercolor (commercially made using natural, hand-ground pigments, and beeswax as the vehicle) and gouache, on paper made from the inner bark of a white mulberry tree. The white mulberry was imported to this continent to create a silk industry in the 18th century and has spread widely; it is considered to be an invasive species. The subject matter is of objects found in a so-called "vacant" lot behind my studio in Baltimore City. 

The shard of china shows a "Blue Willow"- like pattern painted on the white underglaze. My father's mother was Filipino and, though my father denied his Asian heritage * he often told the story of "The Blue Willow". A note that was torn into small pieces was added to the vat before pulling the paper and those pieces are visible as white marks, some with parts of letters visible. 

*it was illegal, in the US, for my grandparents to be married and they and all of their five oldest children lived in the Philippines prior to the start of World War I. They moved to San Francisco in 1918, where my father was born.

This painting is of objects found in a lot that, for around 100 years, contained a block of houses that, in turn, contained families and individuals who lived worked and played on this ground for generations. Included with the shards of beautiful china, which is an indication of the beauty of some of the objects in these homes, there is a more recent artifact — the ubiquitous, discarded tooth flosser. 

One rainy Fourth of July night, as I was walking to a neighbors' house, I saw of a pack of Newport cigarettes with several whole, unsmoked but crushed, cigarettes nearby  — I can imagine the....disappointment? frustration? anger?.... of the smoker as those costly cigs fell into the muddy field. It seems like a portrait of a small tragedy. 

I am not a smoker, not that I didn't try when I was in college. Therefore, I do not fully understand the popularity and ubiquity of Newport cigarettes in Baltimore. Nor do I understand the tendency to just drop the empty pack or empty carton on the street when the contents have been consumed. Empty Newport packs are almost everywhere in Baltimore and, seemingly, especially in the neighborhoods around my studio. I can follow them like a trail of breadcrumbs to get home again. 

Recently, I have accepted the responsibility to clean the two-block area around my studio and I go out on alternate Sundays to pick up trash. I don't usually keep the things that I pick up (!), often I take a photo if I have a chance but, even when I get frustrated by the amount of trash that is left on the street and sidewalks, I treasure some of the still-lives that I find in this wonderful city.

This small watercolor painting is based on a photograph that I took on one of those days, of objects found in a small plot of land, next to a corner grocery store, in Baltimore City: a full-sized, unsmoked, cigarette (a "loosie"), two partially smoked "butts", with matchsticks that might have been used to light those, and a perfectly good, brand-new, screw that was dropped in the lot and lost. I am very interested in the ways in which those objects tell stories of the people who live in this neighborhood and shop at that corner store. 

The 2024 painting is small, 8" H x 6" W, unframed. It is currently in a show, GRIT, at XoXo Gallery, in the Maryland Art Place building.

I made a similar painting in or around 2023 as an homage to David Lynch's Blue Velvet and as a gift for a friend. This version was made at the request of the owner of Galactic Panther Gallery for a late 2023 exhibition. The idea of finding a severed ear (Blue Velvet? Van Gogh? the Japanese ghost story of Hoichi the Earless?) is horrifying and mystifying. After Hoichi the Earless' ears were pulled off by the ghost, what happened to those ears?

This small, 8" x 6", painting is the first in a series that features a beautiful shard of china decorated with a coniferous tree branch and needles.  I found the shard in the fenced backyard behind my studio and I believe that the neighborhood rats dug it up and deposited it there. Maybe they were hoping to decorate their burrows with it? The other small shard, with the Blue Willow-like pattern, is paired with the pine tree shard in several paintings made after this one. All of those paintings are now in private collections in New York City. 

This painting is second version of the painting called  "Vacant lots are full of stories — Brentwood Avenue". Each are in the collection of artists in New York City. 

This small, 8.5" x 6", watercolor and gouache painting is on paper made from white mulberry tree and, as a technical note, was "couched" together with a sheet of paper that I made with Japanese kozo fiber — another kind of mulberry fiber. The "invasive" white mulberry tree was brought to this country from Asia, in an effort to create a silk industry and has proven to be a hardy and opportunistic species.

It is my understanding that The Blue Willow pattern was also brought to this country, from Asia, through Europe. My father, who denied his Asian heritage, couldn't help but tell his children the story of the Blue Willow lovers whenever the china was used. 

In this painting, I have included a drawing of a stockade fence that separates the backyards of houses that surround the "vacant" lot behind my studio. Those fences are very similar — though much smaller— to the fences that were built by the Piscataway who may not have lived on this land but probably hunted and fished nearby. The written text in the background is a reflection on some of those stories. 

In addition to the shards of beautiful, fine china there is a painting of another shard that I found, it is much more humble but probably much older. It speaks to the history that pre-dates the houses that existed on this lot for nearly one hundred years. 

This painting is as much about the idea that "vacant lots" are full of stories as it is about the fact that deafness is rarely, if ever, silent. The images are similar to those in the other paintings in this series but the written text is more dominant — though the words cannot easily be deciphered.

This painting is in a private collection in the Washington, DC area. 

The photograph of this painting does not show the color accurately. I will plan to get a better shot. I was pleased with the transparency of the paint, showing the pack of Newports and cigarette butts seeming to disappear into the grass and weeds. 

This 37.5" x 27" painting with collage, was created in 2005 after another artist gave me a discarded museum board that had instructions for an "Audio Tour" of an exhibition at a major museum. The watercolor painting and black and white collage elements were made on vellum, allowing some of the text of the "Audio Tour" board to be visible. 

The main, watercolor, image was taken from an anatomy poster sold for displayed in audiologists' offices and medical school classrooms. The black and white collaged images were copied from a speech-language pathology textbook and American Sign Language (ASL) "finger-spelling" is across the top, spelling "MISINTERPRETATIONS". 

I had learned finger-spelling as a child, thinking that I would "teach the deaf" when I was an adult. The awareness of my own hearing loss was over a decade away. Since then, I have learned some basic ASL signs, as well as improving my finger-spelling, and hope to be able to learn more ASL in the near future.

This drawing was done following Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines in 2013. It is a palimpsest of telephone messages that were taken over several years — with some anxiety, due to a life long severe hearing loss — relayed, erased and rewritten.

My grandmother was Filipino, though my siblings and I were always told that she was Spanish. My grandparents married in the Philippines, where they raised the first five of their children, moving to San Francisco around 1919, when my father was born. It was illegal for them to be married in the United States until around that time.

One of my cousins has re-connected our family with those who still live in the Philippines and others who have immigrated to the U.S. It has been painful, over the years, to watch news of those islands but, for now, conditions are improving for many. 

This small graphite drawing, 8.5" x 5.5", was created over several years. It is a palimpsest. I had a government job for which one of my responsibilities was to take phone messages and relay those to the intended recipient. Initially, I was provided with some #2 pencils that must have been in storage for quite a while because the erasers had become dry, hard and unusable as erasers. I would write down a phone message, relay it, erase the message (which only smeared the graphite with the old erasers) and overwrite it with the next message. After a surface of text and tones was created, I would make a drawing based on images from the news. 

The images in this palimpsest are:  Pope Benedict, a man in Aleppo, a map of Syria, and a drawing from a photograph of a man that I found on the street. Text from news reports of the impact of the war in Syria on the people who lived there was added. 

This small graphite drawing, 8.5" x 5.5", was created over several years and is a palimpsest of text and images. I had a government job for which one of my responsibilities was to take phone messages and relay those to the intended recipient. Initially, I was provided with some #2 pencils that must have been in storage for quite a while because the erasers had become dry, hard and unusable as erasers. I would write down a phone message, relay it, erase the message (smearing the graphite with the old erasers) and overwrite it with the next message. After a surface of text and tones was created, I would make a drawing based on images from the news. 

The title of this piece, "Degraded Grouping", does not refer to the group of men! It was taken from a section of an audiology research paper that I found when searching for "visual analogies of hearing impairment". I had been referring to these drawings as "visual analogies of hearing impairment" for quite a while and was very surprised to find there was a paper with that exact title. 

Like the others in this series, this is a small graphite drawing, 8.5" x 5.5", which was created over several years and is a palimpsest of text and images. The text is made up of phone messages and other notes that I had to relay as part of an office job. The image is of a dead moth that I found on my desk one morning. 

One of my main responsibilities was to record those messages and relay them to the intended recipient. Initially, the only tools that I had, with which to take messages, were some old #2 pencils — with hardened erasers that smeared the words when used — and copier paper. I had a small sketchbook which a Baltimore artist had upcycled from a text book, "Growing Old in Silence" and I used that to write down the messages, erasing and overwriting with new messages as I received them. 

This drawing is of a small group of trees at the edge of a park that is bordered by several heavily trafficked streets. I imagine that the trees could tell us a lot of stories if we could only understand their language. The drawing is layered over written text from phone messages and other notes. Colored pencil was used to add small bits of red and orange to the tops of the trees. 

This mask represents a tree spirit that is trying to breathe. We need the trees to breathe in order for us to breathe clean air. 

The part that would cover the face is 10.5" x 7" x 4" and the hair and twig extensions increase the dimensions to 25" x 7" x 4". It was completed in 2017.

A year or more earlier, as a fundraiser for an art event in Wyman Park Dell, I had made several simple masks using the aluminum top of a carryout container as a base for the paper mâché. Eyes were cut out and a slit was made for the nose and mouth. In making this one, I used a paper plate to make the triangular nose shape, to bring out the form from the plane of the face. The outer edge of the paper plate was used to give the impression of teeth, covered by the slightly parted lips of the mouth. Pages from the New York Times Sunday paper were used to make the paper mâché and images were selected that showed trees, sky, and water — on the reverse, or the side that would not be seen when worn, images of people were included. 

Hair extensions, found on the street, washed, combed and dried were attached to the top of one side of the face and to the "chin". Twigs were used to roll the paper mâché on the sides and extend above the head. 

There is a degree to which this mask "made itself". As I began to cover the basic mask with full-color images from the newspaper, trees and sky began to come into focus and the mouth took on the form of a being trying to breathe. On my walks to work each weekday, I often found cast off hair-extensions, some brightly colored. The two that I used for this mask seemed perfect to bring it to life as a tree spirit. 

This is the reverse side of the mask, the side that would be hidden when worn. 

This title of and images used in the making of this mask refer to changes in weather and environment. We need to pay attention and respond before it's too late. 

Like others, this mask was made of paper mâché, but uses weather maps and published weather predictions rather than images from newspapers. Rather than use a carryout container lid as the form for the paper mâché, an animal skull was used as the base. Plastic was laid over the skull and the base layer of paper mâché was removed when dry. 

Hair extensions, found on a sidewalk in Baltimore — washed, combed and dried — were added to the top of the skull. Red paper was used for the lips and tongue and black paper was used to create a nose with nostrils. 

This is the reverse of the mask with the same name. It shows the side that would not be seen when the mask is worn and the ties that are used to hold the mask in place. 

This paper mâché mask represents someone or something that has "passed on" from this plane of existence (as it said of the dead) and is intended as a reminder that the Dead may walk among us, so treat all with respect— and a sense of humor because they might dress funny.  

It was made using an animal skull as the base shape; the skull was removed as the paper dried. A tongue was added, as if the Being was "blowing a raspberry" or  sticking its tongue out at the viewer. 

Reverse of the mask with the same name. 

Reverse view of the mask with the same name. This side is not visible when the mask is worn. The images include flowers growing out of dirt and copies of a page of the Book of Genesis that describes the creation of Adam from mud and earth. 

This mask was in the Maryland Art Place fundraiser show,  "Out of Order", and was purchased before I had the opportunity to get a better photo of the front and a photo of the inside, or reverse, of the mask. I will ask the owner if they can take some photos for me. 

This drawing, 17,5" x 23",  was completed in 2019 shortly after the wild fire, known as the Camp Fire, that destroyed the town of Paradise, CA and over 150,000 acres in the surrounding area. That was 2018, many wild fires have followed with a staggering loss of life: human, animal and vegetable, including acres of mature trees and the habitat that they created. 

The bottom quarter of this drawing is a graphite rubbing of the stump of a tree that was at least one hundred years old and had lived, and slowly died, across the street from a studio that I had. It was such a beautiful tree that I made as many rubbings of the trunk, as a memorial, as I could. The circle of bark can be seen at the top of that section. 

Above the tree rubbing, after reports of the Camp Fire began to come out, I made rubbings of some of the textures that might be found in a house like one lost in that and other wild fires: a bathroom floor, the wood grain of a door and tongue and groove floor boards.

From the top of the page to the rubbing of the bathroom floor, I wrote words from some of the news reports of the fires and added text from reports of incidents of hatred: racist attacks, anti-semitic graffiti, homophobic slurs — sadly, those are just a few examples. Layered over the written text are graphite pencil drawings of bushes in the middle ground and trees along ridges in the background, conte crayon was added to indicate the red smoke that is in the wind. The fires are coming over the ridge, seemingly in the far distance, but threatening to grow in intensity. 

The title refers also to fires of hatred, prejudice, ignorance and injustice, among others, that I feel we can and must teach our children to douse. This drawing was selected for inclusion in the 31st National Drawing and Print Exhibition and was chosen by the juror, Doreen Bolger, for a Purchase Prize Award. It is in the permanent collection of the Gormley Gallery at Notre Dame of Maryland University.

2019, 

A large drawing based on news images from the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise and surrounding towns and areas. It includes a rubbing of a bathroom floor and a letterpress advertisement for tools as a memento of all of the homes and lives and livelihoods that were destroyed. 

The first layer is a rubbing of the stump of a large tree, probably well over 100 years old, that stood across the street from my studio, at that time. The tree was slowly dying. When it was clearly dead, the city removed the large branches but some environmental activists threatened the workers and the tree was left to stand as a trunk from which all of the branches had been amputated. Finally, the city was able to come out and cut the rest of the tree down. It was a beautiful tree and I wanted to preserve its memory and the history contained within the rings. 

Detail of "In memory of Paradise" 

Small drawing over text based on images of wildfires. 

Graphite, colored pencil, ink and collaged drawing over written text.  Image is from a satellite view of the Himalayan mountain range at Uttarakhand India where there have been multiple devastating floods and landslides. This one refers to the flooding on June 16, 2013.