"The Benevolent Forest" at the Canyon Road Art Gallery in Santa Fe, NM

The opening of the show, June 19th, with the "Benevolent Forest" series was that of a story telling event. People from Australia, Minnesota, Arizona, Vermont and more arrived wanting to know the tales of the Benevolent Forest series and how it began. The works were exhibited all together to give the viewers the feeling of the forest as a whole & will be available in separate panels exhibited in July as well.

The Benevolent Forest was created during the cold iowa winter of 2014 - 2015. They were my porthole to spring, painting inside while others were pulling their cars out of snow drifts and planning carribean vacations to escape the frozen tundra. The forest design started to develop in the later part of 2015 with a design just before Christmas....

After creating the 7 designs for the 7 panels I wondered off with my neice around Christmas time to see the movie "Into the Woods" American fantasy musical drama film directed by Rob Marshall, and adapted to the screen by James Lapine from his and Stephen Sondheim's Tony Award-winning Broadway musical of the same name. It was as if I wandered into the background of my paintings through an alice in wonderland mirror. With the designs already done & after seeing this movie, it felt proliftic & spurred me on to start the pieces that took the cold winter to finish them in time for an airport show in March-April this year and then they traveled to the enchanting land of New Mexico and have nested in the Canyon Road Art Gallery as orphens waiting for their proper owners to come fetch them for their own.

The paintings have a woodland enchantment feeling combined with animals that interact as friends whist they float within the claypanel foundations & inspiring quotes etched into the sides of the panels. The anthropomorphic pieces are coupled with human inventions of hot air baloons, gramaphones & more. As with most of my paintings, they are all created for compassion towards all beings great and small inspired from meditation, conviction towards peace, vegetarianism, non-extinction & non- violence.

The artwork will be at the beautiful site of Santa Fe's Canyon Road Contemporary Art Gallery, located at 403 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501. They can be seen in person or at their website here;http://www.canyoncontemporary.com/Artist-Detail.cfm?ArtistsID=621&MediumType=Mixed%20media

Feel free to browse the pieces at the link above and ask any questions to the lovely gallery owner, Nancy or her salesman, Alex. They can be reached via phone at : 505-983-0433 or email at: info@canyoncontemporary.com