I'm pleased to share

My painting titled Seeking Balance received the Marsha Pratt Memorial Award at the Mid-Southern Watercolorists 56th Annual Juried Exhibition on display til May 1st, 2026 at the William F. Laman Library in North Little Rock. My thanks to the jurist, Nan Rumpf, the volunteers and board of the Mid Southern Watercolorists, and the Laman Library staff.  

​I thought I would spend a moment telling the story behind the Map series (this is the third in a stack of four paintings).  If you have read the painting’s narrative you know I painted this as part of a series of maps with my father in mind.  My father has Alzheimer’s, a strange state of both being here and not being here. My father was a mathematician and military man who loved puzzles and spy novels (he actually let me use his spy camera a couple of times which I thought was beyond cool). Thinking it might be a befitting way to communicate, I created this “dead drop”, a classic espionage tradecraft, hoping it might trigger memories by using the professional skills he mastered in his lifetime. Although he profoundly struggles to navigate his own thoughts, this map invited him to use his strategic mind to locate a destination - a rendezvous site. While some objects and their placement are specific ciphers, I included some leaves and seashells as organic clues. The idea to place the skeletal seahorse over the playing cards is just a simple tell as to the nature of his disease and "maps" where it is located. But for my father these cards should act as a code that bypasses traditional language and anchor him in a shared memory - so no, they are not placed as random items. I used the YD card as a prod to judge if he understood the task (sorry, family joke). The dry riverbed highlights that the relationship is the only vibrant thing left in an otherwise fading landscape; but was hopefully for him a visual reminder of a beloved place. A glitch in the map, the askew crayon acts as a directional clue; but also signals the loss of the rigid, mathematical certainty my father once lived by.  All of the crayons and their colors are significant, as are the use and placement of polyhedral dice. The representation of dividers, essential tools for plotting navigation, is itself a literal seeking of balance. A tool we both have used professionally included for both direction and connection. The pinned map would be unmistakable to him, but its crumpled state speaks to my own frustration preserving our connection.  Like all coded messages, the answer is only for the intended recipient, most importantly functioning as a bridge between my father’s past and current journey. I thought it significant that the viewers would be aware of the paintings purpose and recognize all the component parts but would be unlikely to know how to decipher it; thereby experiencing for a moment what it must be like for someone with Alzheimers. If anyone out there find themselves in a similar narrative, I suggest that art can be one way to connect.  Back to my brushes.  


"When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions."  - William Shakespeare