Like many east coasters of my generation, I drifted to the New Mexico desert in the 1980’s with a hazy quest to seek spiritual meaning and solace, specifically in my case to escape some of the constrictions of an Irish Catholic upbringing and to glean answers from an expansive landscape. I began making these paintings, always beginning with a loosely controlled gesture with watery paint, an event that births colors, shapes and paper undulations that then become the context for coaxing out a pencil drawing that is often visible only upon close inspection. These pencil drawings are usually figurative in some way- eyes or hands, very tentatively and lightly drawn. I often think about pareidolia- the tendency to see faces in abstract form- as an example of the mind’s inclination to identify with its own individual thoughts rather than more expansively with shared states of simply being. My own sporadic meditation practice sometimes conjures up my long dead maternal grandmother. My mother remembers her lingering relaxed at the table, peering into her teacup after the meals made and fed to her nine children, finding omens in birds or snakes and assigning meanings to them that my mother thinks were mostly reflections of her mood as well as tiny escapes from heaven and hell.