When choosing a Ruins Artist to highlight for The Lamplight Series, I take into consideration so many variables. This month was one of my easiest to date.

I chose them all!

The Girl Scouts get all the credit. I gave a tour to a troop of them last summer and somewhere along the way, one of them asked me if I used coal to sketch pictures on the walls of The Ruins. I cannot quite explain to you the astonishment that rolled through my brain at such a simple question.

One of my favorite things to say lately, is that a person cannot describe a place like The Ruins Project in one sentence.

From the first day I walked through my giant cement canvas, my cathedral to coal, my beast across the creek (The Ruins has acquired many nicknames), I knew it was bigger than me. What I failed to grasp was the scale of the bigness. This place has become big enough to hold the whole world.

Announcing the broadcast premiere of a new documentary featuring the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O Canal Towpath.

My father told me a story today about when he tried to open the biggest window in the world. This window, he explained, was 680 miles long and 500 and some miles high. I asked him, “Don’t you mean feet, Dad?” No, he was quite sure that it was miles and spanned a distance from St. Louis to Michigan. And then on to Big Bear Lake, California.

I have great respect for the self-taught artist. We learn by failing. We succeed through adversity. We thrive without safety nets. We invent and tinker and experiment. The artist who rises up outside of the formal learning institutions is a unique individual. We have many strengths, the most crucial being that fire in the belly that is where all meaningful art begins.

As Robert was installing an old metal furnace grate onto a wall at The Ruins, I had a flash memory from childhood.

She first came to me in 2005 in a dark massage room. Not quite fully formed, but with many of her elements intact. I had been deep into reading Plato’s Allegory of The Cave and Montaigne’s Essays, so I was primed for The Muse to lead me into unknown territory. How amazed my fledgling artist self would be to see into the future almost two decades and wonder at how that momentary flash of a composition would reverberate through my life.

The title to this piece came to me in the shower this week. There must be something about the hot steam that brings out ideas. It happens often enough that I’ve come to smile as they appear above my shampooed head like little burning fairies, screaming for attention. (I consider this an excellent reason for why the proposed bathroom in the basement should be designed with a steam room!)

Coal history in America is an animal unto itself and its chock full of stories, music, culture, tragedy, legacy and heartache.

Check out my latest work and other portfolio updates…

Your peers, your contemporaries, the people who are biting at your heels, reminding you that all is fair in art and war?

I have had thirteen hens in my flock since late last summer.

My cats are outliers. I’m not sure if I have created their strange habits or if they were born with an out of the ordinariness.

They take long walks with me.

It was 1983 in Fayette County, Pennsylvania and I was 13 years old. My little world was full of sticker collecting, exploring the boundaries of the farm and stretching into my identity. I was passionate about horses and in love with Indiana Jones. I wore my rejection of Barbie as a badge of honor.

We live in a world where a strong opinion, on just about anything, can get a person into all kinds of trouble. Approaching the decade of being halfway to dead, as my man so eloquently puts it, the word trouble has taken on a much deeper significance for me. Even in America, where freedom of speech is paramount, trouble can be career-ending today simply by speaking thoughts that others may not agree with.