This painting was one of the few I reclaimed after they disappeared from the gallery.  It had been lost for years and was eventually found in the Charlotte Mint museum in North Carolina and returned to my studio where it resided as the original abstract for a few decades until I could no longer resist showing others what I was seeing.  The abstract said egg-shaped thing (female) with waterfall, pools, nymphs, ecstatic vision.  I could see a central figure pouring something into the pool, another figure touching the falls and a third for balance.  This is probably the only painting I’ve ever completed without knowing one word about who or what they were doing until it was done and I looked at it.  Then it all made sense.  Of course!  This is the “Eternal Spring” and these attendants could only be applying one thing:  ambrosia. Therefore, I call it my most channeled painting.  It became “Bringing Ambrosia to the Eternal Spring.”

Excerpt from Marin Museum of Contemporary Art’s national show in 2014:

Most of my work in the last twenty years has been devoted to portrayals of Mt. Tam. The Ambrosia painting steps outside. This one, along with the Island painting (in the Dreamscapes gallery of my website) became real only by reading the abstract. The narrative of this scene was realized as a literal interpretation of abstract elements in a painting that was originally done in the drip-pour method. That original abstract seemed to infer falls and pools along with an egg-like form. These falls came from an earlier painting of Hawaii called Waterfall Dream and I could see how it fit perfectly under that egg-like thing. That was the first intuition.

Inspiration from the Hudson River school can be seen in most of my work, including this painting. However, I would expand the list of painterly influence to include Pollock (drip-pour), Dali (surrealism), Monet (style), and Cole-Parrish (content), and of course Taylor and Martin.