Recent Deluge Series painting, 48" x 36", Golden paints on canvas, finished Friday the Thirteenth, 9.13.24. (Thank you to Bill for telling me that this was not simply blood, but burning blood.)

An image of our Earth, flayed and scarred with streams of oil and blood like earlier martyrs: St. Bartholomew holding his removed skin was painted as a self-portrait by Michelangelo; and the flayed satyr Marsyas, who dared challenge Apollo, was painted by Titian. 40" x 30", Golden paints on canvas, finished 3.11.2024

Another in the Deluge Series, a dark vision of the future. Black oil invades. Blood is a symbol of the effects of this burning oil – extreme weather and the death of our environment. Here blood falls like a river from a polluted sky when vast fires burn. Golden paint on canvas, 40” x 30”, finished 1.19.2024

Oil and blood, cause and effect, pollution and death. A vision of the future. 20” x 16” Golden paints on canvas, Finished 12.12.2023

Our oceanfront view will be disturbed. As we watch, the fragile sky will tear, and the terror of infinite space will appear. 20” x 16”, Golden paints on canvas, finished 8.18.2023

Another vision of a future, inspired by the fog and round hills of Marin. 20” x 16”, Golden paints on canvas, finished 8.3.2023.

A dark vision inspired by mountains near Salt Lake City, and by the fog of Marin. 20” x 16”, Golden paints on canvas, finished 8.1.2023

Unlike most recent Deluge Paintings, this has abundant water – not invading oil. Painted at the same time as Black Oil, Blood Cliffs, Polluted Sky: one warns of a bleak future, while the other celebrates what we will lose. 20” x 16” Golden paints on canvas, finished 6.21.2023

An Art of Warning: Black oil flows down blood cliffs under a sky turned orange by the pollution of burning trees. 20” x 16”, Golden paints on canvas, finished 6.20.23

Fear of violent seas. Golden paint on canvas, 20” x 16”, finished 1.17.2023

Now atmospheric rivers – a terrifying development – inundate Northern California. Golden paint on canvas, 20” x 16”, finished 1.17.2023

A Postcard from the Future. This one imagines a future when cruise ships filled with wealthy survivors sail on seas of oil. Golden paint on canvas, 20” x 16”, finished 11.22.22

Golden paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 1.29.2022

Golden paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 10.22.2021.

Our past world, a place of peace. Invasion of black oil begins. 48" x 48", Golden paaints on canvas, finished 10.12.21

Looking from a cliff, I drew the sea with a red moon above it, and then twenty-five more similar drawings, with red moons or red suns in eclipse. This painting is based on one of those drawings and on Degas. Here, beneath the dark sky of eclipse, are shadowed, surging black oil and snowmelt. Mostly Golden translucent heavy body paint on canvas. 48” x 36”, finished 7.28.2021

Only a slight promise of white clouds appears above dark torrents of mixed blood and oil, and churning sediment. Mostly Golden translucent heavy body paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 7.12.2021

From tall cliffs thick oil falls without flowing highlights – arrogant, violent, unending. A perfect sky disdains us. Mostly Golden translucent heavy body paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 4.2.2021

Golden Translucent heavy body paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 3.23.2021

Golden paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, Finished 2.15.2021

Diptych of two canvases together, each canvas is 48” x 36”. Golden paint on canvas, 48”x72”, Finished 1.1.2021

I looked at this upside-down and decided I liked it better that way. It still took time to finish it. Golden paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 3.21.2020

A Warning of Deluge. Mostly Golden translucent heavy body paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 2.12.2020

Mostly Golden translucent heavy body paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 1.8.2020

Like the cliffs at Bolinas towering over the sea. I imagine a future with blood and oil falling down those cliffs and falling into the bloody, oily waves. I will not be here, but my grandchildren will. A Warning of Deluge. Mostly Golden translucent heavy body paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, Finished 10.8.2019

Some paintings just happen. They appear without logic or labor. Mostly translucent Golden paint on canvas, 4’ x 3’, 6.26.2019

Before the final future Deluge, the melting of ice and snow has begun. The white cross-contour lines of the rivers define form. Water flows down the vertical format of this painting. The observer has a distant, encompassing view. Mostly Golden translucent heavy body paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 10.23.2018

After years of drought, when Bastrop burned and three of my trees died, we suffered intense heat and rainfall. Then Hurricane Harvey hit Houston. How can I not paint Deluge – the environmental rupture we face now and will face again at our final disinheritance?

Mostly Golden translucent heavy body paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 10.22.2018

As if the earth had been wounded. A Warning of Deluge. Mostly Golden translucent heavy body paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 10.2.2018

I did several blue paintings of water. Golden paints on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 6.22.2018

First of several blue paintings. They often acknowledge our blue world - blue sky and blue water - now under attack. A Warning of Deluge. Mostly Golden translucent heavy body paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, 4.26.2018

Golden paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 3.13.2018

In 2021, this was used as the album cover of Suzanne Ciani’s Improvisation on Four Sequences, Live Buchla Quadraphonic Performance. The painting included an early introduction of red. At the time I did not yet know it was blood. A dance of waters. The red I use is like painting with lipstick. Mostly Golden translucent heavy body paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 2.18.2018

Reseda greens and white, inspired by fog in Marin County. A Warning of Deluge. Mostly Golden translucent heavy body paint on canvas, 40” x 30”, finished 2018

The first painting in the Deluge Series. I was finishing up a series of drawings of water, and starting to paint again, muddling along. Then, in the middle of the night, I woke from a dream of four white rivers falling into a pool. I went into the studio and started painting this image new to me. I painted many paintings of water falling, all on 40” x 30”canvases. Later I moved on to larger 48” x 36” canvases. Golden paint on canvas, 40” x 30”, finished 11.15.2016

Five centuries ago, Europeans feared the end of the world as prophesied, they thought, in the Biblical Book of Revelations. In 1498 Albrecht Durer illustrated that book with 15 woodcuts including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This painting is loosely based on that work as we now fulfill the prophecy of the Four Horsemen: Conquest, War, Pestilence, and Death. We conquered the planet and now live in the Anthropocene. We made war with the Earth with radiation, chemicals - lead in gasoline, CFCs in Freon, and methane, VOCs, and CO2 from oil and gas, and war with each other. We suffer the pestilence of Covid. Now we enter a sixth mass extinction. Five centuries after Durer, we too fear the future.

Mostly Golden translucent heavy body paint on canvas. 48” x 36”, finished 9.27.2021.

A symbol of the cause and effect of burning black oil to run our current civilization, which at the same time, destroys our host planet, particularly by melting polar and mountain ice with global warming and erratic weather. Golden paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 8.15.2021

Mostly Golden translucent heavy body paint on canvas, 48” x 36”, finished 7.18.2020