Shasta Lake draws many meanings for different people. It is a place to relax, to get back to nature, to swim, and to spend time with family. For me, Shasta Lake has always been a special place. I have many great memories there and it has been somewhere close that I can easily go to get away from it all for five minutes or five days. As my research progresses, I get mixed feelings about what has always been a sacred place to me. I love to explore the meandering shores and cool waters but I long for what once must have been an extraordinary place, a place that sustained native peoples for eons.
Once a beautiful canyon at the top edge of one of the grandest, most fertile valley’s in the world, now sunken below an unnatural swath of water that is the most beautiful place for about 3 months out of the year until the water recedes and we are left with eroding gravel and dust. The lake was created to solve California’s “problems.” It would end floods and provide precious water to a growing nation to get us through the dry years. Now 64 years later, California is still threatened with the floods that are endemic to this area and still faces a shortage of water due to the imbalance of resources and population.
In my paintings I strive to bring these two feelings together, the pleasure and gratification of a beautiful day at the lake with the unnecessary and undeserved destruction of a place that was once sacred not to me, but to a civilization who thrived here from time immemorial. I want the viewer to at first, see a beautiful scene that perhaps evokes memories and takes them back to a special time or memory, but then take another look, and contemplate a deeper meaning hidden within the titles and hidden within themselves. I want them to see past mother culture and what we are doing and look through to mother nature and see what we have done and what we could be doing
Once a beautiful canyon at the top edge of one of the grandest, most fertile valley’s in the world, now sunken below an unnatural swath of water that is the most beautiful place for about 3 months out of the year until the water recedes and we are left with eroding gravel and dust. The lake was created to solve California’s “problems.” It would end floods and provide precious water to a growing nation to get us through the dry years. Now 64 years later, California is still threatened with the floods that are endemic to this area and still faces a shortage of water due to the imbalance of resources and population.
In my paintings I strive to bring these two feelings together, the pleasure and gratification of a beautiful day at the lake with the unnecessary and undeserved destruction of a place that was once sacred not to me, but to a civilization who thrived here from time immemorial. I want the viewer to at first, see a beautiful scene that perhaps evokes memories and takes them back to a special time or memory, but then take another look, and contemplate a deeper meaning hidden within the titles and hidden within themselves. I want them to see past mother culture and what we are doing and look through to mother nature and see what we have done and what we could be doing