Back at New Mexico Studio

I arrived back to New Mexico and was having a good time seeing all the paintings together on my studio walls. I pulled out some old paintings of Yosemite I painted back in 1993 to see how they looked with the new ones.





I painted first in Yosemite around 1990. I went back a number of times. In 1993, Tony Shafrazi the art dealer saw the paintings and offered me a show. He had seen a larger blown up version. I spent that summer making 10 large paintings, painting in Brooklyn for the show that fall.







I had invented a figure that started off from Long Island, in a series named Paumanok. It was named after a Walt Whitman poem, an Indian name that meant "fish shaped island".







The figure was associated in my mind with that 19th century poet -philosopher explorer of the new land.
Back then someone called the figure a ' Pop Pilgrim'.