Something happened to me when I got to The Ghost Ranch, above Santa Fe, in New Mexico. I took in the site with X-ray vision, first wanting to see what Georgia O’Keefe experienced. I had also spent time in that territory as a young child. The feeling of the place had remained deep inside me. I was able to soak up not only the ancient history of the mountains, that cerulean sky, those dots of silver sage and the Mesa stripes of fleshy color, but I was completely touched with deep sensual memories that had lay dormant in me for half a century. It all just kept coming back into me.
When I got home to my Pennsylvania studio, I laid out my materials. It was clear to me that this work called for pastels, as there was a dry richness to the New Mexican landscape. That sky, that pure cerulean mass over me, called for my large Chinese brushes and of course, cerulean paint. I became that landscape. The pastel paintings painted themselves.
