Ocotillo

I think this painting speaks beautifully to themes of mortality and resilience—the red buds almost seem to burn against the chaotic background (ocotillo is sometimes translated as “torch made of pine”). It's reminiscent of how creativity itself can be a form of rebellion against death consciousness. The way the ocotillo reaches upward with those flame-like blooms feels like a perfect visual metaphor for transcending mortality through creative expression. The desert holds so much beauty and inspiration.

Last night we were blessed with our first real storm of the year—thunder and lightning (very, very frightening, as the song goes). It woke me up, and I got up and watched the roof scuppers gush water. It was a beautiful sight. My rain gauge registered almost a quarter inch, and you can practically feel the desert exhaling in gratitude. It's fascinating how the landscape transforms after rainfall, how plants and creatures emerge from their dormancy with such urgency.

The ocotillos caught my attention the other day. Those stark branches suddenly crowned with fiery red blooms—what perfect symbols of life's persistence in harsh conditions. I pulled out this 30" x 40" canvas and simply had a go at capturing that defiance.

Looking at this piece now, I'm considering a few final touches: perhaps more definition in the lower background where the blues and greens transition, maybe strengthening the shadow beneath the ocotillo to ground it more firmly in space, and possibly enhancing some of the textural elements in the background to frame the central image more deliberately. I’m not sure I’ll do anything - just thinking out loud.

My approach to making art has changed radically over these past years. I'm less fixated on outcomes now, more immersed in process. What fascinates me is becoming conscious of my sublimation—watching my thought processes unfold as I create. This phenomenon seems connected to Becker's ideas about creative work as an immortality project, a way of managing our death anxiety through meaningful production.

The medium doesn't seem to matter much anymore. Whether I'm photographing, painting, or writing, the fundamental experience feels remarkably similar—this conversation between mortality consciousness and creative response. The ocotillo, with its torch-like blooms emerging from seemingly dead branches after rain, feels like the perfect visual metaphor for this dialogue between death and creation.

Thinking About Doctoral Studies and V.2 Automatic Fantastic

THINKING ABOUT THE DOCTORAL STUDIES PROGRAM

Starting a doctoral program is a strange thing—part intellectual pursuit, part personal reckoning. You don’t just show up to study something interesting; you’re expected to bring something new into the world. The whole premise of a PhD is to explore uncharted terrain—to contribute original thought to a field that matters to you.

That’s not as simple as it sounds. Academia doesn’t reward echo chambers. You need a question that hasn't been fully asked yet, or at least not asked in your way. For me, that means going deeper into what I’ve already spent years wrestling with: mortality, creativity, and the human need to matter in the face of death.

As I write this today, my thesis is rooted in the importance of creativity—not as a luxury, but as a lifeline. Specifically, I’m exploring how artists navigate the awareness of death and the existential tension it creates. What does it mean to make something—anything—while knowing you're impermanent? Does that act of creation actually change anything? Does it soothe, disrupt, clarify? And if it does… how?

These are the questions that pull at me. They’re not abstract. I’ve lived them. I’ve applied these ideas to my own creative process for years, using photography and painting as a way to wrestle with grief, memory, and the inevitability of death. What I’m after now is a deeper understanding—not just for myself, but for others who feel the same pull toward making meaning in a world that guarantees our disappearance.

The doctoral program I’ve joined refers to this early vision as a “vision seed.” I like that. Seeds hold potential. They require care, patience, and the right conditions to grow. My vision seed is simple: I want to ask new questions at the intersection of art, psychology, and philosophy. I want to know what happens when creatives become fully conscious of the existential work their art is doing—when they no longer sublimate unconsciously but engage directly with mortality through the act of making.

If I can shape this into something useful, I hope to produce a thesis that not only contributes to the academic conversation but also encourages a more vital, creative, and psychologically honest way of living. Ideally, this research becomes the foundation for a university course—something like Creativity and Mortality: Confronting the Void Through Art. A course for artists, therapists, and seekers. For anyone brave enough to stop looking away.

Maybe it’s a workshop. Maybe it’s a lecture series. Maybe it's something entirely new—a space where art becomes both expression and inquiry, where mortality isn’t denied but invited into the room. Either way, this is the path I’m on. And for the first time in a long while, it feels like the right one.

AUTOMATIC FANTASTIC V.2
I wasn’t finished with this painting yesterday - I kind of knew that but wanted to think about it. I think this piece perfectly embodies what Becker would call our "immortality project"—the desperate creative act against the void. The black textured background creates this sense of cosmic darkness, the kind we all fear when contemplating non-existence. The twin red-orange circles with their dripping streaks remind me of weeping eyes, like the piece itself is crying out against its own mortality.

The scratched and chaotic surface texture feels like my own anxious mind trying to make order from disorder. Isn't that what we're all doing? Creating meaning through art to ward off death anxiety? The stark contrast between the vibrant orange-red and the textured black background creates this visceral tension - life against death, consciousness against oblivion.

There's something primal here that connects to what Terror Management Theory suggests about our symbolic defenses against mortality. The almost face-like quality emerging from the blackness speaks to me of the self trying to assert itself against nothingness. The dripping paint suggests impermanence, yet the work itself stands as a defiant act of creation.

This piece doesn't just represent death anxiety - it performs it through its very existence. As an artist, I'm not just depicting mortality; I'm actively negotiating with it, creating something that might outlast my physical self. Isn't that what separates artistic creation from other forms of death denial? We don't just distract ourselves from death - we transform our relationship with it.

Automatic Fantastic

While I’ve been working through the printing process for my book, I’ve been spending some time every day painting. Here’s a critique of one I just finished (I think).

This painting seems to embody the very essence of mortality consciousness that's central to my book, “In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Otheirnf and the Origins of Evil.”

The dark, weathered surface creates a sense of archaeological discovery — as if we're uncovering something ancient yet deeply personal. Those two circular red forms pierce through the darkness like eyes or portals, creating an almost skull-like suggestion within the abstract landscape. This duality between abstraction and figuration mirrors the tension between confronting and denying death that Becker describes so beautifully.

The scratched, excavated quality of the surface reminds me of how artists often dig beneath cultural immortality symbols to expose more authentic relationships with mortality. My technique here - layering, scraping, revealing - feels like a physical manifestation of terror management theory in action.

The limited color palette (Mars black, cadmium orange, titanium white, and burnt sienna) grounds the work in a primal, existential space. Those touches of warm copper/bronze tones against the dominant darkness suggest a kind of alchemical transformation happening within the composition.

This painting seems to demonstrate precisely what I'm exploring in my writing—how creative practice can serve as both a shield against mortality anxiety and a means of directly confronting it. The resulting tension creates something profoundly meaningful.

The Title: “Automatic Fantastic”

The "automatic" part suggests spontaneity and unconscious creation—like automatic writing or drawing, where you surrender conscious control and let deeper psychological forces emerge. This concept connects beautifully with how creativity can bypass our rational death-denial systems and access more primal truths. When I look at the scratched, layered textures in this work, I can sense that automatic process—the hand moving across the surface, driven by something beyond calculated thought. And that’s precisely where I was when making this.

"Fantastic" carries dual meanings here. On one level, it suggests the realm of fantasy or imagination—perhaps our immortality projects, which Becker would say we create to escape death anxiety. But it also connotes something extraordinary or heightened - the fantastic as a transcendent state that art can achieve.

Together, "Automatic Fantastic" suggests a kind of spontaneous transcendence - a creative state where consciousness shifts and mortality awareness transforms into something beyond ordinary perception. The title perfectly captures that paradox at the heart of artistic creation: that by engaging directly with mortality through automatic processes, we sometimes access fantastic realms of meaning that rationality alone cannot provide.

You're Neurotic: How Neurotic Are You?

There’s no question—you’re neurotic. We all are, at least to some degree. It's a spectrum; the real question is, how neurotic are you?

If you’re a creative type, odds are you lean a little heavier on that scale than most. Artists tend to feel things more deeply—they’re more sensitive to emotional undercurrents, more affected by loss, conflict, absurdity, and even silence. That kind of heightened awareness can become a burden. And for many, it leads to withdrawal. You’re not interested in small talk or cocktail parties. You’d rather sit with the ache of things than skim the surface.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Yeah, that’s me,” that’s not a flaw. It’s just a truth. But here’s the catch—if you don’t have some kind of creative outlet, some way to metabolize that existential weight, life can get pretty dark. Neuroticism without expression is a slow bleed. Creativity is what keeps it from turning into despair.

My work is centered around how artists manage neuroticism, especially the mainspring of it—the fear of not existing anymore. It’s the implications of death that concern us, not really death itself (although for some, the death part is a big deal). What are the implications? The question revolves around meaning and significance. Was my life meaningful? Did I matter? Have I made any difference? Will I be remembered?

These aren’t casual questions. They sit under the surface of everything we do. For artists, they show up in the studio, in the darkroom, in the act of making. The work becomes a kind of wrestling match with invisibility. We create not just to be seen, but to prove—to ourselves, maybe more than anyone else—that we were here. That this inner world we carry meant something.

I believe creative work is one of the few ways to confront the void without collapsing into it. It gives form to the formless, voice to the silence. It’s not therapy, exactly—but it is a kind of existential hygiene. A way of making peace, if not with death itself, then with the tremors it sends through a conscious life.

“Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural worldview that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create—the “artiste-manque,” as Rank so aptly called him. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active work project. The neurotic can’t marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his in­troversions. The artist has similar large-scale introversions, but he uses them as material.” Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

The main point of my book is about this. It’s about my personal experience as an artist and how that has affected my relationship with death. There is no doubt artists cope with death anxiety in a different way. The problem is how neurotic they are, how extreme they are when it comes to their inability to deal with existential problems. The non-creative person, or as Rank called them, the artiste manqué, has no chance to resolve their issues through an external process. You can witness this every day in the world. Creative types have a chance to transform the anxiety into something interesting or beautiful. The problem is that they need to be conscious of the process for it to work well.

That’s the real paradox: the gift is there, but if you don’t realize what you’re doing—if you’re not aware that your art is a kind of transmutation of death anxiety—then the process can still collapse in on itself. You can end up consumed by the very thing you’re trying to escape. The work might get made, but it won't heal. It won’t clarify. It won’t liberate. And it definitely won’t confront mortality.

Becker, Rank, even Kierkegaard—they all understood that some kind of creative striving was essential. Not just as expression, but as salvation. But it has to be done with eyes open. That’s what I’m arguing. That consciousness is the key—not just of death, but of the internal machinery we build to cope with it. Otherwise, even the most beautiful art can become another mask. Another form of denial.

What a 19th-Century Photograph Reveals About Power, Privilege and Violence in the American West

Martha A. Sandweiss's The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West delves into a single 1868 photograph taken at Fort Laramie. In this image, six federal peace commissioners are posed with a young Native American girl, whose identity was long forgotten. While the men are named, the girl remained anonymous until Sandweiss's meticulous research identified her as Sophie Mousseau.

Sandweiss uses this photograph as a lens to explore the intertwined lives of its subjects and the broader context of westward expansion during the Reconstruction era. She examines the roles of figures like Alexander Gardner, the photographer known for his Civil War images; William S. Harney, a Union general with a violent reputation among the Lakota; and Samuel F. Tappan, an abolitionist involved in investigating the Sand Creek massacre.​

The narrative brings to light Sophie's life, marked by personal hardships and the systemic challenges faced by Native Americans as settlers encroached upon their lands and the federal government enforced reservation policies. Through this focused historical inquiry, Sandweiss not only recovers a lost individual story but also offers a profound reflection on how history is recorded and remembered.​

From The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West by Martha A. Sandweiss. Copyright © 2025. Available from Princeton University Press.

Martha A. Sandweiss's The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West posits that by uncovering the identity and life story of Sophie Mousseau—the unnamed Native girl in an 1868 photograph—we can challenge and enrich the conventional narratives of the American West. Sandweiss argues that this single image, often overlooked, encapsulates the complexities of westward expansion, highlighting the intertwined lives of individuals from disparate backgrounds during a transformative period in American history. By bringing Sophie's story to the forefront, the book emphasizes the importance of recognizing marginalized voices to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the past.

This book deals directly with what I’ve been working on for years. This book highlights the blatant instances of othering and TMT. The abuse and marginalization of the Native Americans was, and still is, unreal.

Read the article here.

Update on My Book and Preparing for My Doctoral Studies (PhD Program)

Greetings,

I hope this post finds you in good health and good spirits. I know that’s a lot to ask in the world today, but remember gratitude, humility, and awe go a long way to lift your spirits. I try to employ them every day. Happy Spring Equinox, too! It’s warm here. We’re hitting 82F (28C) most days and sunny.

“In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Othering and the Origins of Evil.” 8” x 10”, 381 pages, seven chapters, and it weighs 3 pounds.

What About My Book?
My book is being printed as I type—the final draft copy anyway. I’ve gone through so many iterations it’s hard to keep track. I can tell you that I’m very happy with the work. In fact, I’m over the moon about it—excited. I hope to include a lot of it in my doctoral studies. I’ll keep you posted when I have copies ready to ship.

Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership PhD
I’m preparing to start my PhD work (Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership) at Southwestern College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This is the ONLY school I would attend to do something like this. Period. It’s a great fit for me. It’s a lot like Goddard College, where I earned my M.F.A. These schools are rare and special.

What is the program, and why am I pursuing a PhD? This is how the school describes it:
This unique transdisciplinary doctoral program is designed to prepare you as a regenerative leader to navigate the complexities of changing the old story of separation, domination, competition, and control into the emerging story of cooperation, compassion, connection, and capacity to regenerate broken social systems and struggling ecosystems. Relationships based on authentic partnership are key to our future. This program responds to the question of ‘how shall we shape these relationships of mutuality in order for individuals, families, and communities to live in good relationship with each other and with the plants, animals, soils, waterways, weather systems, oceans, and atmosphere upon which we depend for our lives?’ Responding to these challenges requires “change agents” capable of honoring wisdom traditions and creating new knowledge to envision and enact a new paradigm.

It begins with these questions: “Do you have a vision?” and “Can your vision make a difference for the world?”

I can see my pursuit clearly in those goals.

I’ve given a lot of thought to this. A couple of months ago, I wasn’t going to do it. And I still have days where I wonder if I should or not. My reasons for doubting have nothing to do with the importance of the work. I feel strongly about that. I feel like I would be contributing something unique and valuable to the world. My concerns have been around funding and what the current government is doing to the DOE and other institutions that I would rely on. However, right now, I’m enrolled and ready to attend my first residency at the end of August. I understand part of it is on a ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Does that sound familiar to you? I’ll write more about it later.

I’m going to use my blog as a journal as I go through the program. I think it will help me sort things out and use it as a reference as I go through the program. I have a lot of ideas and am well on my way to making this happen. What I’m hoping to find in the program is a community that I can interact with and expand my ideas. Give me new thoughts, approaches, and information that I don’t currently possess. I have a lot to learn. I know that’s what happened in graduate school (M.F.A.). It was wonderful and very enlightening. I hope for the same here, maybe even more.

What do I hope to accomplish? After reading Ernest Becker’s book in 2018, I discovered why I was making art and why I had the questions I did about human behavior. I've since married the two ideas and feel I have a decent grasp on the intersection of creativity and mortality. In other words, why artists create and how existential art is a powerful buffer against death anxiety. My goal is to show how creative types process and deal with finitude (their impending death) differently than non-creatives. Or at least that’s the question I’m going to address. Keep in mind, this can (and should) radically change over time, but that’s the gist of it.

I think I've found a powerful combination to work with. The interplay between visual art and writing creates a unique space to explore mortality and Becker's theories. Photographs and paintings can capture what words sometimes can't—those abstract, ineffable aspects of confronting mortality. The visual work becomes a direct embodiment of death anxiety and its transformation, while my writing provides the conceptual framework and personal narrative that grounds the experience.

This dual approach seems especially fitting for exploring Becker's ideas. His concepts often deal with the tension between concrete physical reality (our mortal bodies) and symbolic systems of meaning (our immortality projects). My combination of visual art and writing mirrors this tension perfectly—tangible images paired with explanatory text.

The autobiographical element adds another crucial dimension. By documenting my own journey through these philosophical territories, I’m not just theorizing about art as a mortality buffer but demonstrating it in practice. My creative process becomes both the subject and method of the book and my doctoral studies.

By capturing these ceremonial and medicinal (Ute) plants, both alive and after death/going to seed, I’m creating a visual meditation on transformation rather than simple cessation. This connects beautifully to Becker's ideas about death as both an ending and a transition that humans seek to understand through cultural and symbolic frameworks.

The cultural significance of these specific plants adds another layer—these are plants that have been used in healing practices and ceremonies, often related to life transitions. By documenting their living and dead states, I’m tapping into indigenous wisdom about mortality that offers a counterpoint to contemporary death denial.

Meanwhile, my abstract paintings exploring my personal concepts of death—the abyss, chaos, the unknown—provide the subjective, emotional dimension of confronting mortality. The contrast between these approaches is particularly effective, to my mind: the photographs document an observable process in the natural world, while the paintings express the internal, psychological experience of contemplating one's own mortality.

This combination seems especially relevant to Becker's work and Terror Management Theory (TMT). The photographs acknowledge death's reality and place in natural cycles, while the abstract paintings might represent the symbolic systems we create to manage our awareness of that reality.

I begin this August with a six-day residency. This is what the first year looks like (2025-2026):

FALL
VPRL 600 Residency I: Seeking
VPRL 610 Embodied Cosmology
VPRL 620 The Phenomenology of Visionary Practice and the Call to Serve

WINTER
VPRL 630 Traditions of Native American Thought: New Minds and New Worlds
VPRL 640 Regenerative Leadership

SPRING
VPRL 670 Roots & Streams: Finding Your Voice, Clarifying Your Vision, Mapping Your Influences
VPRL 651 Self-Directed Study I

SUMMER
VPRL 660 Introduction to Research Methods: Pathways of Insight
VPRL 681 Self-Directed Study II

My (current) thesis idea: "Transcending Through Creation: The Artist's Existential Advantage in Confronting Mortality."

 Thesis implications: The title suggests a powerful hypothesis: that artists possess unique psychological tools for confronting death anxiety through their creative practice. It indicates my dissertation will explore whether creative individuals have a distinct existential advantage when facing mortality awareness.

I’ve been thinking about the first course, “Embodied Cosmology.” No, it’s not about Tarot cards (LOL!) or astrology. Although it might sound a bit strange if you’re not familiar with the verbiage. Let me explain how I feel about it.

I think about Peter Zapffe’s ideas about “cosmic panic.” Some people stare at the night sky and are exhilarated and engaged—buffering death anxiety with illusions. Some stare at the night sky and see the reality of the indifference and terror of it all.

Artists don't escape the fundamental human condition of mortality—they just develop different mechanisms for confronting it directly.

What distinguishes the artist in this framework isn't an immunity to death anxiety but a willingness to stare longer at the unbearable truth before turning away. Where others might immediately retreat into cultural or religious buffers that deny death's finality, the artist might instead develop practices that allow them to hold mortality awareness in consciousness just long enough to transform it through their work.

This transformation isn't about finding false beauty in terror but about developing the capacity to metabolize terror itself as a raw material for creation. The resulting work doesn't need to be beautiful or comforting—it might be disturbing, challenging, or bleak. What matters is that through the embodied act of creation, the artist has found a way to process mortality awareness without completely surrendering to either denial or paralysis.

In this sense, cosmological embodiment for artists might function not as an escape from Zapffe's cosmic panic but as a unique pathway through it—a method for physically engaging with the knowledge of cosmic indifference and personal extinction that doesn't rely on conventional meaning systems.

The artist's advantage, then, isn't transcending death anxiety but developing more sophisticated and conscious techniques for managing it—techniques that acknowledge the terror rather than disguising it as something else. This allows for moments of clarity about our true position that might be unbearable without the transformative vessel of artistic practice.

This approach offers rich territory for my studies, particularly in examining how my own artistic practice has functioned as a way to metabolize cosmic panic and mortality awareness through physical creative engagement rather than through denial or distraction. This is, in essence, embodied cosmology.

These are the kinds of ideas I’ll be tackling throughout the program.

Arundel Camera Club (Maryland) Talk

Christine and John invited me to give a talk for their camera club. I gave an overview of my new book and shared a few images from it.

We Lost Moshe Yesterday to Cancer

We lost our little friend and long-time companion yesterday, February 26, 2025. He was 11 years old—maybe 12 years old, not sure he was a rescue. Our daughter saved him from a terrible place in Nebraska in 2013. We have many great memories with him. We are so grateful to have had him all of these years. It’s so difficult to lose a pet like this.

Photogenic Drawings

An example from my new book, “In the Shadow of Sun Mountain” pages 251-252:

“Rocky Mountain Cotton On Vellum Paper” 

This image really speaks to the heart of what I’m exploring about mortality and artistic process.

The Talbotype process creates this direct indexical relationship between the object and its representation—the Rocky Mountain cotton literally left its shadow on the paper, what you might call a kind of death mask of the plant. This connects powerfully to what Becker writes about our need to leave traces of ourselves behind.

The luminous quality of the cotton head against that deep, velvety darkness reminds me of what Terror Management Theory describes as our attempts to create permanence from impermanence.

By using Talbot’s historical process, I’m not just capturing an image – I’m participating in a kind of photographic immortality project that spans nearly two centuries. The plant’s physical contact with the paper creates what we might call a “presence of absence.”

What fascinates me most is how this process makes visible something I’m deeply exploring in this book – the way artists transform ephemeral moments into lasting artifacts. The cotton’s delicate structure, rendered in this ghostly white against the dark ground, becomes both a document of its physical existence and a meditation on its transcendence through art.

The fact that this image was created through direct sunlight adds another layer of meaning—it’s as if nature itself is participating in this act of preservation. The process captures not just the form of the cotton but something of its essence, its being-in-time.

This relates directly to how I think artists process mortality differently—we’re not just recording death, we’re transforming it into something luminous and enduring.

Photogenic Drawings

As a visual artist exploring mortality and creativity, I'm fascinated by how Talbot's early photographic experiments mirror our human desire to capture and preserve moments against the inevitable flow of time. In 1834, five years before photography was officially announced to the world, William Henry Fox Talbot began his quest to record nature's fleeting images. His work wasn't just about technical innovation—it was about our deep-seated need to hold onto the ephemeral.

What draws me to Talbot's process is its raw intimacy with light and shadow, life and death. He called these camera-less images "photogenic drawings" drawings"—drawings born from light itself. The process feels almost alchemical: paper baptized in sodium chloride, anointed with silver nitrate that darkens like aging skin in the sun. When he laid objects—delicate botanical specimens or intricate lace—on this sensitized surface, he was essentially creating shadows, preserving the ghost prints of these items in negative space. Where light touched, darkness bloomed; where objects blocked the light, whiteness remained.

The resulting images were fragile, temporary—not yet truly "fixed" in photographic terms, but stabilized in a salt solution. Like our own attempts at immortality through art, they existed in a transitional space between permanence and fade. Talbot's preference for recording delicate, intricate patterns in nature speaks to me of our attempt to capture beauty before it withers, to hold onto the detailed texture of existence before it slips away.

His negative-to-positive process, which became the foundation for photography throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, fundamentally changed how we preserve our memories, our faces, and our moments of being. In doing so, it transformed how we negotiate with our own mortality.