Accumulation

These paintings are memorials to the amassing of material items, synthetic and organic, permanent and fugitive, collections that take years to acquire such as a library of paperbacks or several days as the weekly trash, or minutes as a gathering of cut flowers. The piles of objects in the paintings refer to patterans or trails, a word originating in Europe- signs used by travelers as messages left for the purpose of informing any of their companions, who might be straggling behind, the route which they had taken. Patterans were made of natural materials, such as handfuls of grass thrown on the ground or stones heaped in cairns. They were markings at cross-roads, sometimes seen at a great distance, ordinary items used to retrace a path. The steep pyramid piles in the paintings are inadvertent trail-markers of our current time.