Community Outreach

May & June 2026: Coyote Corvidae (CC)

Artist Statement

Perhaps, in the end we are all gifted with some manner of synesthesia… how is it possible to capture the deep quiet experienced in these deserts onto a canvas? Though I make no claim to have successfully done so, it is that time buried in such perfect silence, the sense of enormity encased in stone one experiences when roaming upon the Colorado Plateau, that I’m attempting to imbue in my work. It is the struggle, the dance, the hours spent alone watching shadows swallow entire mesas, that I’m attempting to capture, and that I hope the viewer might sense.

I often paint over an under painting that includes abstracted forms and bright color, with sand, sticks, etc. from the local desert embedded in the paint. My paintings are usually worked on used canvases resold at secondhand shops, and I sometimes leave bits and pieces of the prior work visible. Such canvasses carry a past life that might add an undefinable wealth to the present work.

So, if you wake up on a mid-winter’s night, lodged high up in the walls of a canyon, perhaps, listen. Listen to a silence so total that the hum of one’s own body machinery rings out clear as a canyon wren’s call. A silence that, some may claim, is as old as the 64 million years encased in the sandstone through which these canyons are carved.

A silence which seems to bore into that stone itself, to reconnect with the primal elements from which it came. If you’re lucky, lying on a bed of piñon needles perhaps, that stillness will be shattered by a coyote’s wail, or accompanied by the furtive call of a great horned owl. How to render that onto canvas? That’s the working problem I’ve been addressing these last few years.

*A note on those pieces which include native designs: It is to honor those who have lived for so many generations here, as this artist since the age of four has been profoundly attracted to all things tribal in the southwest. Half of the artist’s royalties of those canvases imbued with such magic as petroglyphs or work found on ancient pottery will go towards such nonprofits as Adopt a Native Elder, Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition, and Sacred Circle Health Care.

Those works will be specified. The artist invites you to research these and many other nonprofits dedicated to tribal people in the region.

Best,

Coyote Corvidae
(known by friends and enemies alike as CC)

Artist Bio

Nearly all of my work is in some form or other related to wilderness. I sense these upland canyons and mountains, here on the Colorado Plateau, as the carrier of a language, a language always sensed but never really understood. It is embedded in the cutbacks of canyons, the waves of sand left in arroyos after a hard rain. A form of calligraphy shaped by time, immense time, wind, water.

And though lately I’ve pushed beyond landscape into fairly abstracted works, the juniper, tarantula, and cumuli have become ghosts which still trespass into my works. I adore this place. This place blessed with time, deep time, and have made it my attempt to imbue these paintings with the feeling of millennia, of geologic age. This is of course impossible, but it is the dance, the attempt that keeps me coming back to the canvas.

I work mainly in acrylics, with some watercolors, and many sketches. Sometimes I’m driven to mix in a little river sand, or twigs from sage brush into the underpaintings. Usually I paint over old canvasses sold in secondhand stores, and from time to time leave bits and pieces visible as a way of paying homage to those artists whose work I’ve disappeared. I’m sure in some future a few of my works will have made their way into a Goodwill or WabiSabi, and that is the circle of this world of art.