My artistic lineage is American and European impressionism and expressionism. Painters I have learned from include my father, Tom Spence, Charles Burchfield, Thomas Hart Benton, George Inness, Arthur Dove, Emily Carr, John T. Biggers, Diego Rivera, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, as well as Daumier, Van Gogh, Bonnard, Vuillard, Monet, Manet, and Cezanne. I cannot imagine ever letting go of the hand-produced stroke. I think paintings need to seduce the viewer and be compelling and about something. My work is narrative, surrealistic, historical, and lyrical.
oil on canvas, 24 x 30”, 2022
I worked on these paintings while living on the Fort Washakie homeland in Wyoming.
These works emerged out of my fresco work. They are acrylic on sheet rock. I was trying to get the driest surface possible.
This triptych, part of the movable frescoes series that began in 1999, refers to a trip I took looking for John Biggers' murals in the American South.
This painting occupied much of my year, challenging me in the level of detail and also of marrying the scale between the very precise painting on the ground and the towering shimmer of the spires.
After 9-11 this painting broke in two.
I made Radio Tower, my seventh fresco project, as part of the World Views Studio Program. I was in residence on the 91st Floor of World Trade Center One for six months making this project.
These tapestries continued the fabric works I started in graduate school. Only these sought to achieve the dryness of fresco using acrylic and a matte additive.
I made these works on paper for the first show at Bellwether Gallery in Brooklyn.
This is the first fresco I painted, in Serre di Rapolano, Tuscany.
Chartres Street, watercolor on paper, 11 x 15", 1990
