Hope. 30 x 40. (In a letter to Merilyn Caler, 27 June 2005.)

Thank you for the photographs of my painting you called "Hope." I
think that is a proper and expressive title for it, and I am
astonished to find that a complete stranger upon viewing it received
an emotional response very close to mine when I created it. The
subject of course was evoked by the New Mexico landscape in late
summer when the big thunderstorms abound. At that time in my life I
was being violently attracted to becoming a painter, and as you can
see from the short biography you included with these pictures, my
entire life had been filled with just about everything except
painting. So that landscape is in effect an allegory painted from my
imagination of a dark, passionate and violent world with a shaft of
bright sunlight illuminating a living tree. Naturally all I really
did was try to paint how I felt, and none of these specific thoughts
were in the foreground of my mind while I painted it. Therefore, I
thank you for naming it for me.

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