My painting was born in the cypress swamps of Mississippi, where I was conceived, under a white herons wing and a drunken parade. As God would have it, I fell upon horsemint and a cement slab, seen flying on the back of a star over the yellow rooftops in Okolona.
I would find my painting again behind an old horse barn in Brasstown. 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. In fall the maples melted between old brick and wood of abandoned churches. I can start to hear mice in the walls, horses in their stalls fattening up, a whisper of death.