Moving is always a big decision. Moving to another country is bigger. Moving a family to another country is huge. The process took years. There were positive and negative factors contributing to our decision. The positive factors were really stronger, even though some of them were somewhat conjectural for us. Our only previous experience had been as visitors. My wife had been to Narbonne as a grad student, studying the cathedral there during a summer. I had been to Paris a few times, and I had also spent some time in Provence. For me as an artist, I was in search of a combination of things: a varied and picturesque landscape, an old culture containing various deep mythologies, and a society that thought more of artists as serious people. For us as a family, it soon became clear that France held out, simply, the possibility of a better life. The landscape has always been part of my concerns as an artist, although generally it served as a vehicle to impart something universal and not local. I found myself using images from books as points of departure, making paintings such as the one on this page, Net, depicting the Lakes of Killarney, but containing ideas from Irish literature and Buddhism. Living in the middle of Houston while mentally living on the other side of the world created a vague sense of longing that took years to act upon. I now live in a landscape that is beautiful, full of history, and charged with mythology that dates to the Bronze Age. The River Seine, which flows no bigger than a trout stream through Mussy, is named after the Celtic goddess Sequanna.
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