While in Italy last year, I had a powerful dream about a mystical white horse. It was both transcendent and transformative, and I knew I had to paint it. Never having painted a dream before, I began with the symbol that underlies many of my paintings of the last twenty-five years: the squaring of the circle. This time, the circle evolved into a spiral--one of humankind's oldest symbols--which represents the journey of the soul into the center of one’s being. Here, that center is mine of course, but paradoxically you, the viewer, are now also involved. So whose soul are you really perceiving, mine or yours? Or is the Soul (capital S) really One?

Tilting at Windmills is a series of charcoals, oils and watercolors I did in response to both the attack on Paris in 2015 and the refugee crisis in Europe. The water towers were completed first and came to symbolize sentinels, watching and waiting, ever on alert. Whereas the windmills became a complex and paradoxical symbol of Greece, where refugees have found both safety and demise. No longer operating, the windmills represent the unemployment crisis in Greece, a source of much of the anger towards the refugees. For the refugees however I saw the windmills as a beacon of false hope, the promise of work that is not there for them either.