Recognized August 22, 2026

Invented Romanticism becomes lived

An invented-to-lived Romanticism arc: Nature vs Nurture (1994) uses the cross as a generic, Dalí-derived symbol of belief -- not Christian, since the artist was raised without religion -- within a painting about the religion of Romanticism itself: an idealized, unlived nature borrowed wholesale from European painting. The Global Peace Walk 2000 supplied a lived counterpart -- direct exposure to Native American ceremony and thought, walked rather than imagined, arriving at a moment when the artist's SF-not-USA, Turtle-Island self-identification (held since early childhood) met something ceremonial and land-based rather than political for the first time. The artist describes this Romanticism as no less romantic, but more real than the earlier invented version. In Transition, the only visible trace of this shift is structural rather than pictorial: RGB's three channels becoming CMYK's four echoes the sacred number four in Native American Church tradition, confirmed by the artist as noticed at the time of making. The thread surfaces more overtly in Prophecy and in Four Nations (not yet catalogued).