the pane of it

about these paintings:

last year I was at an artist residency in Eastend, Saskatchewan in an old house built in 1907 by the father of Wallace Stegner.  I lived in that house built by Wallace Stegners dad  for 1 month - cooked, slept, painted. spent most of my time upstairs in a small room sitting in a chair, looking out a window into a landscape of small hills that had dinosaurs buried in them from 1,000,000 years ago. It was a most beautiful landscape, unique, and I wanted to paint it onto a piece of paper with gouache paint. I mixed some colors, looked up at the landscape and down at my paper. up and down. looking and painting. I tried. over and over, day after day but it didn't really work out. I was distracted. my mind and vision was constantly being interrupted by the sight of a flash of a bird and the sound of scratching and pecking. for several hours each day this went on until I began to be compelled by the flash of a bird and the scratching and pecking and I no longer paid much attention to the landscape of buried dinosaurs. in fact, I began to see only my own reflection in the windowpane periodically superimposed by the flash of a bird and so, at some point, I transformed the landscape painting I was painting into my reflected face in the windowpane and fragments of a bird. this was the beginning of the work I did, work I had no idea I would do, during my tenure in the Wallace Stegner house in Eastend Saskatchewan.