Ten years ago, after my partner died by inches right in front of me, I lost my mind. It was the end of the world, and somehow relevant to that, I wound up down in Mexico, having run there after he died because it was as far away as I could get from the Great Fuckening that had tumbled down into my former life.

I crossed over the border at Tijuana, with almost nothing except my dog and me, and after anxiously dusting off my rusty Spanish at a Tijuana market to buy some dog food, we headed down the Pacific coast with no destination in mind because, as far as I was concerned, I was already dead. Without any map, we just headed south, as far into the scorching embrace of the coastal Mexican desert as we could get. (I have written about, and painted, this unlikely pilgrimage here and there over the years, trying to parse out some of the meaning.) That beautiful, surreal, and – to me, anyway – utterly alien landscape splashed its glorious stains in surprising places across my psyche, and every now and then I return my mind to what it all was.

Thus, when I started on this series of Existential Landscapes – a collection of abstracted pieces connecting landscape and mindscape – Tijuana rose back into view. I was captivated by this city, though I was only there for a short time before heading down into the desert. (I’m often startled to discover the reality of cities that are universally derided by people who have never been to them. For instance, I also think Cleveland is a beautiful, frozen, art deco fortress of a city, and if your first impulse is to laugh at that then I’m pretty sure you’re going by stereotypes you’ve heard and not personal experience. But that will be a different piece.)

I was in a very different mind space when I was drifting through Tijuana, so who knows how it might strike me now. But at the time, I was very much taken with the feel of this place. (I’ve just spent 20 minutes trying to describe what I saw and felt there in words, only to realize that the words are absolutely insufficient. So… I deleted them and this would be why I often process things via the visual arts. )

This is a very small piece, acrylic and watercolor on paper – at only about 6 x 8″, it is much smaller than most of my work. But I’m strangely happy at the way it turned out. It feels very much to me what it felt like to be standing there on this mostly empty Mexican beach, on bright yellow sand, looking out over turquoise water, beneath a tall cliff that had pathways and stairs, and even the odd bar and restaurant, carved into its ancient face.

I stood there like a crumpled statue, at the time. I was still wearing all the black and silk from the service, which had been the night before leaving for Mexico. (I had not brought any clothes to change into, so that’s all I wore the entire time I was there.) It was the middle of a scorching hot summer, but I remember vividly experiencing my manifestation in the world as though it were the end of autumn; as though I were nothing but the tangled, black, rotting remains of the summer’s garden, clinging desperately to some dilapidated trellis with the winter coming on. It felt incongruous, this broken black shard of widowhood silently drifting through such a dreamlike landscape. Everything was beautiful, and everything felt empty and unreal. I had the sense that I was drifting through a dream. I’m still not sure that I wasn’t.

So that is the source material for this particular existential dreamscape.