Post Hills With Horn Toads, 40” x 50”, Acrylic on Canvas, 2025

Artist Statement:

We are all marked by the passage of time. This year, I turned 70 years old. With this milestone, I found myself reflecting on the ebbs and flows of my life, and the intuitive processes that have guided my artmaking for the last four decades.

I arrived to Lubbock in the early 1980’s and enrolled as a graduate Art student at Texas Tech soon after. I was a single mother and an immigrant, and was still finding my voice as an artist. Slowly, I entered into relationship with my new surroundings. I planted a garden and found unexpected pleasure driving into the landscapes of west Texas, where I began to photograph the sky and blooming land. I noticed light and texture, color and depth. As I began to paint these landscapes from the photos I took, I merged them with female figures from memories, dreams and myths. In finding my voice, painting had become my new language.

This year, I found myself returning to the landscapes around me. I drove out to the Post Hills that I painted so long ago in 2003, and photographed them again: at sunset, at sunrise, with clouds, with blooms. After the spring rains, I visited the watery playas and studied how dramatically the water behaved as the sun moved across the sky. I noticed how the sunrise threw colors on their surfaces, while the summer storms darkened their waters. I painted them, then drove further, to New Mexico. Each journey yielded a new painting. But unlike my previous paintings, these works did not need the human figure or stories to make them complete. They were already whole. And with each of these paintings, I also felt more whole, more at peace.

I call these works “Land Anchors”. Against the upheavals of life, the subtle and resilient landscapes of this region have become an unexpected anchor for me - a reminder that life is filled with beauty and light, loss and renewal, and that time shapes everything.