Cactus, attacked 10 years earlier by a machete-wielding vandal, were transformed into human shapes, inspiring the painting.
This1980 painting was inspired by reading about a tiny Tucson congregation of fundamentalist Christians who believed the Apocalypse was beginnning. In preparation, they sold their houses, found new homes for their pets, and quit their jobs. They believed the Ayatollah...
This is a scene from a small town in southern Portugal, called Olhão in the Algarve. The town no longer looks like this. Many of the buildings have been replaced with high-rise structures.
The giant black mountain in the background was an obstacle for many people, but some found a way to get through. The fist time I went to El Paso, I was riding in a car with a friend on a freeway that ran along the Rio Grande. All of sudden, a group of young men came...
I imagined witnessing a haboob in the Tucson Sam Hughes neighborhood.
This is Nogales, Mexico, the border town just south of Tucson. This painting is mostly accurate, but I had to shorten the length of the very wide La Caverna restaurant so that it could all fit.
The San Xavier Mission is also known as the white dove of the desert. It’s considered by many art historians to be the most beautiful mission in the country. Inside the church, many visitors see the reclining statue in the glass case in the west transept, and...
We found out too late that Marrakesh rug salesmen are reputed to be the most high-pressured salesmen in the world. We bought five rugs we didn’t even like.
Our House in Norwalk, Connecticut. My studio was on the left.
I read about a collection of albino animals and painted my version of an albino farm. I limited the colors to skin tones of all races: white, brown, black, yellow, and red.
The Algarve is in the countryside of Southern Portugal. Much of the architecture is from the Moors, dating back centuries. The structure at the upper left is a Roman ruin.
Just a mining town in Arizona.
The Blessing of the Animals celebration at St. Philips Episcopal Church in the Foothills of Tucson, Arizona.
Los Angeles, kitsch to culture. Growing up here, I remember the dog restaurant, which was shaped like a giant Fox Terrier. This was shown in Japan to more than a million people. It is the biggest-sized painting I’ve ever done and it took seven months to complete...
I’ve been concerned about the environment and global warming for a long time. It greatly concerns me that there is so much apathy about necessary changes that must be made.
This painting resides in the permanent collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut. At the time, this museum was one of three museums in the country that specialized in American art. A woman I met was talking about self-taught...
This is a house I came across during my visit to Portugal.
This was my grandparents’ house in Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. The man at the top of the hill is Harry the Hermit. He had an American Flag and a bathtub, and nothing else (that we knew of). In the foreground you can see my grandmother in her Chevy....
At the time that I painted this, monsoon storms in Tucson were quite dramatic, much more so than now.
Monsoon storms in Tucson used to be more dramatic than they are now.
Long ago in Norwalk, Connecticut, pigs were allowed to run free and they were capable of doing damage!
This work is now in a collection in France, in a museum that exhibits the paintings of self-taught artists. This is the oldest house in Tucson, which itself is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the United States.
Our fish pond in Tucson was visited everyday, sometimes more than once, by our neighbor’s dog, who enjoyed bathing in it. She never bothered the fish. Other animals, including the quail and rabbit in the painting, enjoyed the pond as well.
Semana Santa, a festival in Spain, is one of the most dramatic human-made events I’ve ever seen. Tho floats depicting the stations of the cross are carried on the backs of men many of whom come from surrounding villages to earn money . Some of them wear shoes...
Obsolete Red Bird subway cars were dropped into the ocean off the coast of Cape May, New Jersey to create artificial reefs that would attract fish and edible marine life. Initially, there was great opposition to it, even among environmental groups, who worried that...
I love the architecture, now mostly in ruins, that the Moors left in the Algarve region of Portugal.
I read about in the newspaper about a woman who saw the face of Jesus in the scorch marks on one of the tortillas she was making. After that her husband gave up drinking and thousands of people came to their house to see that tortilla.
I lived in Buffalo, New York for few years, where I witnessed blizzards. In California where I grew up, I had never seen one before.
