My paintings take place in the imaginary proscenium of the Great American West, a place where past mythologies meet with present realities in unknown and often unacknowledged ways. My work is a quest into this unknown—a modern-day expedition to discover what previous settlers have done and to recreate old mythologies for present and future settlers. The cowboys in my paintings are, like myself, outsiders without any definite home, coexisting with the old and the new like the east and west bends of the Mississippi River.