Month: December 2025

Oil on Panel, 2026

An androgynous figure emerges from a cluster of flame-shaped agave leaves, hands clasped in prayer. Above them, a chimeric creature descends: a heart-shaped cactus, with bat wings and a single piercing eye. The painting was inspired by two common scenes in religious art: depictions of the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends upon the Apostles of Christ, and the Anima Sola, which is a votive figure of a penitent soul surrounded by tongues of flame. In my art I like to mingle traditional scenes from the tradition of religious art with unexpected, mysterious elements, grounded in the native landscape from my home in South and Central Texas. Is the strange spirit or harbinger descending upon the figure holy?

Graphite on cold press paper, 2025

I create these chimeras – these creatures that are marriages of flora, fauna, and human body – to be like harbingers, ushering in unseen possibilities in an age of fracture and ecological collapse. Thus these chimeras are invitations to step into new and more powerful ways of being to meet this moment. The title is a reference to a favorite hymn from a childhood spent in church:

Let all mortal flesh keep silence and with fear and trembling stand;

Ponder nothing earthly-minded, for with blessing in his hand

Christ our God to earth descendeth, our full homage to demand.

The fleshy appearance of the smooth nopal cactus has always seemed appealing, but I know better than to touch it. 

Oil on panel, 2026.

A woman with golden skin wades chest-deep in dark water in the foreground, her fingers snaking through her long black hair. Behind her the last golden light slips behind the softly rolling shadowed hills. No moon hangs in the sky – instead, the sickle-shaped curve of a glowing rib bone floats above her.

The painting has many ancestors, including the tradition of the penitent Magdalene, a folkloric avatar of Jesus’ companion who has abandoned society to live out her days in the wilderness in mournful contemplation. I also returned to Leonor Fini’s Le Bout Du Monde (The End of the World), which depicts a woman partially submerged in dark water surrounded by bones and decaying plant matter beneath an apocalyptically red sky. 

My Magdalene-like subject is lost in reverie beneath the sudden appearance of a disembodied floating rib bone. To whom does the rib belong? How did it make its way into its moonlike position? Is she doomed to be simply another Eve, fashioned from such a bone, or does her separation from this lineage liberate her from narratives of subordination and oppression?