Stories link us together, across our cultures, our pasts, our futures. I have always told stories in my paintings even when stories were not what paintings were supposed to tell. They are the way I understand the world and how I fit into it. They allow me to tell you part of who I am and yet they allow me to remain partially hidden in the costumes and affect my roles require. Somehow, I always seem to manage to climb onto the set and into the painting, sometimes as a bit player sometimes as the leading actor.

My paintings narrate not only events in which human and animal actors play, but they also narrate the set on which the stories take place. To me, narration explains how we all fit together with each other and with each component of our environment. It describes the relationships and patterns, the crisscrossings, of our emotions, of our bodies, of rocks exposed in a cliff, of tree branches reaching to the sun, of the way a knight's suit of armor fits together--ring of mail to ring of mail. Paintings do not describe a journey through time as stories in words or music do, but paintings can picture a specific moment, which, in turn, gives you clues about other moments before and beyond the picture. We not only see a mountain pass, but we can decipher how the rocks the pass describes were formed or at least how they were laid down. Perhaps we will envision a geological process or perhaps we will see simply a painter's pattern-making.

Because I am fascinated by these patterns, it is important to me to specify what I understand about them. And, it is patterns and connections that medieval painters tell me about in their tempera-coated, wooden panels. They offer me their understanding of how each person, how each element, in the painting relates to each other. They are not vague. They do not make generalizations. They give me a map, a diagram, of how everything is constructed, and yet that is not all that I take in. They dazzle me with their colors and beckon me to come among them--to follow the path to the harbor, to climb the cliffs in the background, to explore the cave off to the side, to wonder at the leaves linked to each other by fragile stems. And, along the way, these ancient panels manage to tell me quite a bit about their makers as well. These paintings come through seven centuries to tell me stories that connect me to their lives and to their streets and forests.

And since they have invited me to come to them, the stories in this series of paintings start with them.