Rocky Mountain West

Colorado

This high mountain steppe is my homeland. The dry ecology is where I feel most at home. Summers were spent at the Lazy Shamrock Ranch, where my father became known through the Blue River Valley as a master irrigator. He greened up the pastures using flood irrigation over the course of 60 years working there.
Cowboy paintings from the Lazy Shamrock Ranch
Brand – pencil drawings = 2006
Still Life in the Tack Shed – 2005

En plein air:
Aspen – 2007
Uplands of Shadow Creek Ranch – 2006

Landscapes
Pine: an intimate portrait of lodgepole pines impacted by beetle kill

In tandem with cultivating our own food and starting down the path of a Slow Food inspired life, I created paintings of the chemical impacts of the US industrial food machine out of concern of how we nourish ourselves.
Commerce City
rain | refinery | slaughter
Eastern Colorado Plains
crop | Titan

Hybrid
This exchange with Irish artists looked at the influence each geography has had on the other. The work created for the exhibition in Colorado depicted the long term impacts of the century old mines, wherein the Irish worked when they first arrived in the west. The exhibition in Ireland consisted of digital collages created out of my lifetime of experiences with the Flanigan family on the Lazy Shamrock Ranch.
Leadville mines exhibited at Redline in Denver

New Mexico

We lived in Taos, New Mexico for the first five years of my son’s life. When I started feeding him, I became very concerned with the quality of our food production. We planted a permaculture garden around the ‘Distillery’ and together created watercolor paintings and haiku that followed the seasons of A Year in Grandpa’s Garden

Clippings
An Artful Adventure in Sustainable Living by Lyn Bleiler | Eco Source Magazine
artists’ diaries: The Tales of Thatcher Gray – A Year in Grandpa’s Garden | edible magazine
Extreme Backyard Gardeners | edible Santa Fe – Albuquerque – Taos

Vivan las Acequias!
We established the Taos Distillery as a creative incubator for land and water relationships in mountain steppe ecologies. Located on the Los Lovatos ditch in the Taos network of Acequias, we invite creatives to explore solutions to desertification caused by climate change.

The Taos Distillery: Storyteller Residencies & Retreats
Information on staying at our historic adobe in the Land of Enchantment

Texas Roadkill

Northeastern Forests

Maine

Neo Rio 2020: HOME
Hosted by LEAP (Land Experience & Art of Place) as a virtual engagement during the COVID19 pandemic, the work explores ideas of HOME. Our work situates ideas of home and displacement as we reflect on the place we currently dwell.

We moved to Maine in 2016 so that Thatcher Gray could learn about the natural world, forest and sea ecologies in the prime of his youth. With an extraordinary number of ecologists who live and work here, my time here has been invaluable in learning how to work at the intersection of Art & Ecology. The bulk of work created here looks at the relationships of whole ecologies and has allowed me to think about how best to contribute creatively to the restoration of lands both here and abroad.

Maine: butterflies
Insect Apocalypse: Bombus

The South

Carolina lintheads
My grandmothers came from southern Appalachia; bloodlines indigenous to this gentle mountain landscape intermingled with Welsh/Scoth immigrants. This series explores remnants of our family and ties to the era of industrialized weaving, before the practice was outsourced to other countries.
Lintheads from South Carolina – drawings & paintings

Central America & the Caribbean

Haiti

Nearly a decade of participation in the Ghetto Biennial, my work in Haiti included planting food forests in central Port-Au-Prince, cooking with the grandmothers in the neighborhood & sketches of neighborhood residents and market stalls.

Cuba

Pietà: Torched Angels from Havana’s Graveyard
Santaria: Shrines from the African based religion

Guatemala

Chichicastenango, Markets: Considering the impacts of international markets while meandering through the vibrant Mayan marketplace

Europe

France

Chateau de la Napoule, France
It was at the Chateau de La Napoule .debris. was initiated during a 2012 residency that was geared towards creating work with a young audience in mind. The question, ‘Do You See What I See?’ was intended to celebrate the many perspectives through which our age, experiences, and culture inform our creation of and connection to art.

Spain

Butterflies endemic to la Huerta: a series of watercolors created at AADK in Spain looking at the disruption to pollinators caused by heavy chemical use in the ‘gardens’ of Europe

Eco-printing at AADK: during the sweltering month of June, we tried eco-printing with rust activated water in the sun.

Africa

Morocco

2022 Residency at Green Olive Arts exploring the roots of Acequia practice in the Rif
This residency provided the opportunity to explore origins of Acequias. Having adapted systems that originated in Persia four thousand years ago, Moroccans built sequias throughout the Atlas and Rif Mountains. Upon establishment of alAndalus on the Iberian Peninsula in the 9th century, they built the same systems as part of their farm networks. After the Spanish pushed Andalusians back into Northwestern Africa, they recognized the benefit of flood irrigation to amplify the water tower effect offered by mountain hydrology to broaden alluvial plains through dry steppe ecologies in order to cultivate the desert. The Spanish kept the systems in place, and eventually carried these methodologies to the Americas to install or broadened indigenous systems though the Andes, Patagonia, Mexico and the desert Southwest.

Walk up the Zarka Valley to see verdant farms thriving despite the mid summer heat
Urban Farm utilizing Acequias along the Martil River below Tetouan
Printmaking at Green Olive Arts using plants sourced on our walks

Kenya

A visit to the Masai after climbing to the top of Africa

The Cradle Project
Raising funds & awareness of children orphaned by poverty & disease in sub-Saharan Africa. Initiated by Naomi Natale of Albuquerque, NM.

Botswana

Okavango Delta
An excursion through the delta during a roadtrip around the south.

Asia

Viet Nam

My father taught English and American culture in SaiGon for nearly thirty years. Starting with a visit in 1990, we had the opportunity to witness the full blossoming of the country from desperately poor to one of the most thriving markets in southeast Asia. I love Vietnam. The profound scale of time awareness, the ephemeral but enduring culture and the gentle ways of being in the world has offered continued inspiration over the decades that I have been able to return.

A Selection of Portraits from Southern Vietnam Spanning the time I first visited Vietnam in 1990, these portraits are of friends who have remained close over the years.

The Floating Markets of the Mekong Delta: photographed in 1999, these watercolors were created in 2023 to reflect the ephemeral nature of the communities in the great delta that covers southern Vietnam

Through the window of the bus: street scenes in Ho Chi Minh City from the front windows of a city bus in 1969

Sai Gon wires: Impossibly tangled wires adorn the streets of central Ho Chi Minh City

Hill-tribes of northern Viet Nam: pencil drawings created on the cusp of change.

India

Sacred Waters :: Ganga
This series looks at the relationship with the sacred river that flows through Varanasi, India. From rituals to daily chores, the ancient and monumental stairs host the range of interactions with the waters that flow here.

Poetry Collaboration with Drew Myron: The Making of Dust

Burma

Confined Shrines of Mandalay
On the streets in Sacred Bagan
Cottonweavers on Inle Lake maintain traditional weaving practices on their hand-hewn looms that fill their stilted wood houses.
Meandering through the Intha market on Inle Lake

China

Industrial Silk Mills in Sou Chou, China
Part of an exploration of various forms of weaving practiced today, industrialization dominates these portraits depicting labor in the mill.

Cambodia

Rajavihara: the temple of Ta Prohm in Angkor Wat

Hawai’i

Even though Hawai’i is officially a part of the US, culturally it is the crossroads of many different Asian communities living in the America. This series of oil paintings looks at Kalihi Markets and Chinatown streets around the new millennia.