This drawing belongs to a body of work examining the practice of nudism among senior citizens. My subjects' participation was voluntary, and they were not posed. Rather, their very agency instructed my portrayal of them. This work intends to retrieve nakedness and aging from a culture that exploits and maligns both, and to exalt the embodied experiences of older people. Drawing is my means of palpating, charting, and experimenting within corporeality. The portrait begins when my subject and I become visible and thus also responsible to one another. I mine excruciating color from their skin, disclosing it in brittle chalk with my fingers. I make them huge because they are huge. In the intractability of trying to see or know somebody, in the wilds of flesh and gazes, they are huge. I put them into paper because paper is mutable, and can suffer like skin can. I terminate our encounter when I fossilize them there under glossy resin.

This series is a reaction to being lumped into an accustomed and normalized system of living, a system that views abnormalities as wrong. In truth, the human body is fragile and only a fraction away from exhibiting a deformity or disability. Rather than subscribing to ordinary, everyday customs, these sculptures represent the personal growth it has taken to look beyond the typical state of being. This is a portrait of my truest, rawest self, in pain.

This was a homeless gentleman who came to draw portraits in the workshop with us one Friday afternoon here at Chico Art Center. He had been invited by Mark Gailey, who met him and was impressed by his artistic aptitude, at the Jesus Center. He graciously agreed to model for us part of the afternoon. I saw in his face, weariness, longing and a resigned acceptance.

I love painting and drawing the human face and form. Expression in each, or both, is completely open to our interpretation, both in viewing a piece of art, and in real life. In this painting, I use the bird as the classic metaphor for hope (as in the Emily Dickinson poem). The subject's wry look toward the bird speaks to her relationship with the concept of hope.

Far too often, we take things at face value. This piece is a personal investigation of my own identity, beyond the external. "From the Inside Out" is the literal translation of the ASL sign for transgender, addressing two parts of myself, which I further explored throughout the making of this piece.

Particles: A Painting in Ten Chapters. Each chapter examines a different moment in a lifetime. Seniors is a painting of my entire senior high school class, including their senior statements.