My painting was born in the cypress swamps of Mississippi, where I was conceived, under a white herons wing and a drunken parade. I frolicked about here through my early years, taking in the smell of pine burning against dark rural skies, where a boys gun was as natural as his penis. The stories of slaves and farming, the seasons burning with colors and feelings, that resignation to the idea we were different. I found it later on the bottom of the Chattahoochee River, floating by a bible and a dream. Those brown waters against the warmth of fall leaves would ignite my love for expressionism and poetry. Those whispers of fundamental Christian sects baptizing each other with cottonmouths have created certain anxieties in my brush. Returning to the twig galls, I fell upon horsemint and a cement slab where I painted exhibitions for people to see all over the world. I would take trips on the train to visit my uncle in Meridian, the same place I would throw his ashes accidentally on two dogs a year later. The American South is hauntingly beautiful, it could supply a person novels, paintings, and songs for eternity. The worn down homes singing like children in a choir, I was flying on the back of a star over the yellow rooftops in Okolona. I would, as of recent, find my painting behind an old horse barn in Brasstown, North Carolina. It was at the foot of the Appalachians, a throw from fields of wild mint, from rocky outcrops of an ancient kind. In winter the mountains were on fire with white. White against dark wiry cedars, against the black of my paint. And in the summer endless patches of Queen Anns Lace, chimney swifts flying just below the old train bridges, the shimmer of brown trout at the surface of the cold river waters. In fall the maples melted between the old brick and wood of abandoned churches. I could start to hear mice in the walls, horses in their stalls fattening up, a whisper of death.