(in the artist’s own words)

Like the image of a palm tree, the horse image is rooted in a childhood experience. At roughly the age of ten or eleven, on a family trip to the Sonoran desert in Mexico, a horse ran away with me. The horse sensed my lack of control and bolted, leaving the Mexican cowboy and my brothers in the dust. After what seemed like a very long ride, the horse stopped abruptly with me still on his back (barely). I never did have the horse under my control, but I did outlast him. It was a growing experience. The “horse and rider” image is more a metephor for “the struggle to control” and “perseverance” than anything else. The tension or lack of tension between the horse and his rider is the focus of these works.