Wilderness Walk Series

These paintings are a duplex of time: a mirrored chamber in which I watched my own life collapse in the same shape my father’s had decades earlier.

First came the losses in rapid succession—my mentor, then my father, then my career as senior taxable-bond trader for Bank of America. I had traded for fifteen years, and the house we lived in was valued at half a million dollars. My wife and I sold everything, uprooted, and moved to Austin, Texas, dreaming of a quiet life where I could finally paint full-time, picking up the thread of success I had tasted in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

 

God had other plans.

 

Five months after arriving—uninsured—I dissected my carotid artery. A long hospital stay, six (very expensive) MRIs, four surgeons, and a newly developed inner cranial carotid stent (I needed two) drained our fortune. For a full year I could not speak. No adequate work appeared, so I took a post with the U.S. Treasury in Austin and settled into a strange, existence I never meant to keep.

 

The Wilderness Walk paintings were born in that trap. Each canvas is built around the skeletal ribs of old Texas wood towers—icons of drought and endurance. Across them I collage every denomination of U.S. currency, the very paper I once traded by the billions and now I’m part of a Federal operation giving away the same paper in the form of large tax refunds to undocumented aliens. A single common Americana logo, repeated like a watermark, ghosts through the compositions….reduced now to metaphor.

 

If the sins of the father are indeed visited upon the son, if broken DNA demands payment, then these towers are the ledger. They stand stripped of water, crowned with money, and branded with the mark of a fallen empire—silent witnesses to the moment a life, like a currency, is called in. 

 

However, the lesson learned overtime (and timestamped by my paintings) was that God the Father was building me—a unique son of His—and answering an old prayer I whispered each morning in front of the Disney Concert Hall in Downtown L.A. (Its polished steel Exterior flashed like the beryl-stone of the New Jerusalem) while I begged NOT for another Cadillac to park beside my father’s Red one, but for relevance: a life that mattered beyond the ledger. I prayed for purpose in His kingdom, as opposed to monetary wealth in this one.

 

He severed the DNA tether to the Hotrum line—its pride, its patterns, its inevitable collapse—and grafted me into His living Vine. The towers in these paintings are no longer tombs of inheritance; they are towers of growth, and strangely, chess pieces on a vast board. Each one is an immovable object that forces a sudden change of direction. 

 

Stripped of water, crowned with currency, branded by a fallen logo, they testify that the old man was crucified with his empire. What rises from the ash is a son who finally speaks—not with the voice of Wall Street, but with the quiet authority of one carried through the wilderness, broken, remade, and set (although wobbling) on his feet again.