September 2002

The inhabitants of these painterly landscapes are men of action who, through the refinement and abstraction of history and the media, have become the embodiment of manhood. The larger scope of this "series" of paintings includes depictions of hunters (resourcefulness), cattlemen (self reliance), explorers (adventurousness), and now soldiers (valour).

What is most important in this work is that I am a woman looking at war, hunting, exploration, and other manly pursuits from the position of an outsider. Throughout history, women have watched men form up ranks, march off, depart, return broken or whole, but the specific experience of an explorer or soldier -- valour, confusion, violence, fear -- can only be guessed at, and even then incompletely. Consequently, the men in my paintings appear at a distance. There are no depictions of the heroic event in these paintings. They are like images imagined in the absence of experience, a hazy apparition lacking details.