I spent the better part of 2019 applying to coastal residencies around the world for my Pirate Queen’s series. But I came across two – one was in a ghost town and the other in Breckenridge, CO that I also applied to. I wrote great proposals utilizing work I had been doing over the years. I was rejected from every single residency. Even though I was rejected I felt like the work I proposed for the Western residencies was valid and I should just do it on my own.

Over the years I have been altering a book of Remington’s sketches of the West that I bought at a library sale. It’s an old book with faded paper and all this space around the images which bothers me - feels like wasted space - so I reworked it as a sketchbook/artist book and added 2 minute gestural figures from my figure drawing group. Another book I bought at the library sale is a history book for teens on the American West- no mention of Black Cowboys- that I turned into a visual journal. I wanted to take images from both books and blow them up and rework them into larger pieces. For some of them I wanted to make a grid (I have this thing with grids if you remember my “Stripped” Exhibit) and glue down the images sided by side and then work on top of them. Last year, after all the rejections, I scanned all the images in these books and printed up copies and forgot about them.

Feeling lost and not knowing what direction to take with my current work for the SBCC but still compelled by the western imagery yet unable to go to a printer at this point in lockdown to make copies/prints, I suddenly remembered this collage material. Like hey, don’t I already have Western imagery that I am not attached to that I can use as background? On the smaller panels I glued them down in a grid and on the larger panels I glued them down randomly.

On one of the panels to connect it with older work but also to separate it from the diptych I added a large tile pattern stencil in a fluorescent magenta color over the collage. The colors I thought I didn’t like created a vibrancy I don’t normally see in my color choices.