Artist's Statement: The cowboy is my main symbol. I use what he stands for as something that’s almost lost to many of us...The American Dream. I began to use the cowboy image after the death of my father. Expressing my grief, I painted Dad from an old photo which showed him as a handsome man in his late twenties, standing proudly in front of his employer’s Model T truck. I entitled it "The Vanishing American."

It dawned on me that cowboys are another vanishing breed. But I’m not painting history. Rather, I’m trying to capture the good feeling associated with the way we thought about The West as children. I’m fascinated with the romantic, idealized western myth, just like the traditional western artists were. But there’s a group of us artists that the September 1994 issue of Art Talk described as using symbols of the west to express universal emotions. The magazine writer said we take the traditional one step further by celebrating the mythical qualities that are associated with the west. We deal with the larger-than-life character that embodies the repressed wished, hopes and desires of a whole modern society.

In surrounding my figures with metallic leaf, the images do become more a symbol or icon rather than a depiction of the reality of a particular person and place. Crating icons is straight out of my Catholic background; religious icons reflected an ideal of times past just as the romanticized cowboys do now. The truth is, the word "cowboy" was a slur on the black men who worked on ranches, whose lives were definitely grim. But then even in my advertising career, ideals--what something could be like--always fascinated me the most.