My current paintings and writing are part of a larger project which I call Crazy River. They are layered ruminations on my life-long relationship to the West Branch of the Neversink, which runs between Ulster and Sullivan counties in New York state. “Neversink” is a corruption of the river’s original Lenapé name, which means something like “crazy river.” The project asks the question: What happens when environmental catastrophes upend a landscape you know and love?
Crazy River draws on memories, epiphanies, and stories about the West Branch and the western Catskill mountains handed down through my family. Two catastrophic back-to-back floods, Hurricane Irene in 2011 and a localized super storm in 2012, woke me up to the climate crisis in my corner of the world.
