Artist Statement: This painting is from a series of oil paintings depicting scenes from my travels to Morocco. Journeying to Morocco, I fulfilled a personal dream that I had never believed would happen. Often, we fantasize about things that we don’t really expect life to bring to us, and this was that sort of dream. I was thrilled and fascinated to spend time in a place and culture so different from my own. I traveled with a small group from Marrakech, into the Sahara Desert, up into the High Atlas Mountains and then to the coast. We were guests of the Hadj in one village, we visited with Berber tribes in several villages and towns, watched demonstrations of their trades, and absorbed the Berber and Arab art, architecture and patterns around us.

When I returned, I began creating a series of small prints based on Moroccan scenes in which rich areas of color -- red, yellow, and dark blue – were applied over solar plates with exposed simple line drawings. The plates were designed so the background held saturated color, and the line drawings showed up in white. The color was not applied to conform to the lines. The three colors of inks mixed slightly where they met, forming variations in tone, and secondary colors. The patterns of the color dominated the pieces and forced the line drawing to a more subtle role. I loved these little prints. They resonated deeply with my sense of who I am as an artist and person. Looking at them was like eating candy.

At the same time, I was working on a very different series of architectural prints. They were extremely detailed, intricate, representational drawings and prints of Irish ruins. The difference between this series and the one described above was like night and day. I sought a way to bring my tendency to tightly render images together with the looser, more abstract qualities of the line drawing plates.

So, I used some of the same images from those small candy prints and chose some additional ones for a group of ten oil paintings of the architecture and landscape of Morocco. I allowed myself to render the shapes of the figures in the scenes, but used color to communicate texture, temperature and the tenor of my own feelings about the subject.

Having Tamnougalt Ksar chosen for the Critical Care Building is especially meaningful to me. My father has been battling cancer this year, and I’ve spent hours with him in waiting and chemotherapy rooms. He’s spent countless more hours in these rooms and in a hospital bed, and although art is not normally a big part of his life, he’s often talked about the art on the walls in the various rooms. Boredom has been one of his frustrations with being ill. I hope this piece has the vitality and intricacy to hold the attention of someone who is too sick to even read or talk, but needs to focus on something interesting, and something apart from his or her illness.