Handfulls of Purpose
NEWEST WORK
20"x 20" | Oil on Canvas | 2026
The stories we tell about the American West are full of motion — cattle drives, gunfights, land rushes, men on horseback riding toward something. Those stories are true, and they matter. But beside every one of them stood a woman holding something just as heavy.
She gave birth on the trail. She buried children in unmarked ground and kept moving. She worked the land with the same hands that braided hair and mended harnesses and coaxed fire from wet wood in a February wind. She didn't ride into legend. She built it from the inside out, one ordinary, extraordinary day at a time.
Handfuls of Purpose is a portrait of that woman. Not a specific woman — every woman. The one history didn't overlook so much as simply forgot to turn around and see. She's still there. She never left.
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't soften. She just looks straight through you and waits for you to finally look back.
This work is currently entered in Unbridled: An All-Women Western Art Exhibition at the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art. Inquire for availability.
Child of the Red Mesa
WIP
Oil on wood panel | 11" × 13" |
There are faces that ask nothing of you and give you everything. This young girl, dark eyes steady, feathers resting at her shoulders like something ceremonial and natural all at once, is one of them. She belongs to red earth and canyon wind, to a place where the land is old and the people older still. Painted in oil on wood panel, her portrait begins in the colors of that country. Raw sienna, terracotta, the faint blush of rose madder — the mesa itself, ground into pigment.
The clothing is still becoming, loose charcoal lines tracing the shape of what will be, while her face has already arrived. Fully rendered, fully present.
From the beginning, I was drawn to the idea of making oil behave like pastel, coaxing the paint into something soft and powdery rather than slick, something that feels drawn rather than brushed. The warm wood panel beneath her lends itself to that. It breathes through the paint the way desert air breathes through canyon stone, giving the whole surface a quality that is neither one thing nor the other, but something quieter than both.
She is not performing for the viewer. She simply is, in the way that children are before the world teaches them to explain themselves. The feathers frame her like a quiet inheritance passed down through generations of red earth and open sky. The background glows amber behind her, a halo that doesn't announce itself. The last light of a mesa sunset, caught and held.
