 I went to Mexico in 1989 and so I stayed there off and on like a snow bird going back and forth for over 20 years. The Mexico Years exhibition at the Community CTN Space here in Portland was curated by John Ripton. It was work that was really the heart of my painting experience in which I was able to develop techniques that I was employing in my work as well as to bring in to focus the people, the land and some of the history of Mexico. Convergence to me meant sort of like a coming together and it also was part of a series of work I did in 2002, Aztec Deities and the Convergence and the Goddess Mother Earth in Green and Brown, three works, three large works, very large paintings, 50 by 30 in dimension, all vertical and all done with chapapote or tar which I was able to find a way to utilize to keep the brown tones into this particular body of work. The Convergence series interestingly is a series of 20. Out of this came these kind of mystical figures coming out of that chapapote which he used, the tar in the background which you know at the end of these paintings he really he called them like they were a communion. So it seems to me what was happening here was a emergence from the background, from the earth itself, from the chapapote, these visionary figures that visit him and he's trying to connect with them, to paint them, to make the image. One of the paintings in the gallery show at CTN was a portrait of Reggie, Salazar's father. Reggie, he was a difficult man to deal with in my life and I did a painting that was in the exhibition here in the Community Television Networks Facilities. The head image is him and I called it just Reggie, dedicated to the day of the Dead series. If you look at the painting it doesn't take much observation to see that it's a very dark painting. The outline of Reggie is almost tentative and looked like it might have been done very quickly and it's just lines around outlining his face, his eyes, nose, his mouth. The eyes look a little distant, maybe a little sad. The background is this black or near black background as I recall and you get the feeling that Reggie is somehow falling into the blackness and it's not, you don't walk away from that painting with a, I'm not going to say you walk away with a negative sense, but you walk away knowing that there was a troubled relationship there. I'm not going to tell anybody that I was using tar, which is what chapapote is, a resin, they kind of look at me as if you're nuts. In Mexico, years and years ago, and way back into the history of Mexico, it was used to draw a lot of attention to the work on boats to cook the boats and also to preserve wood for effectively. And so I developed a way in which I could mix the tar so I could dissolve it in such a form and add resins to it and I could use it in painting. The brown tone of chapapote as it turns out on the work is very clearly the brown tone of the figures of Mexico, the people of Mexico, it speaks to Mexico. And furthermore, when I was down in Mexico, I wanted something that came from the earth of Mexico that was part of Mexico. I didn't want, and yes, you could use some handmade papers that were made in Mexico, but for oils and other mixed vehicles, that wasn't going to work at all. You can see in a couple of these paintings of the 20, all my heads are the heads of the figures that are coming out of the chapapote. So that connection to the almec, which is the mother culture of the ancient Mexicans, the first civilization in Mexico in the area of Veracruz, where chapapote is found, that connection is solidified through the use of chapapote through the outlines of these heads. So Roland was making a real connection with the Mexican past, and he was doing it through the earth. It was from the heart of Mexico because it boiled up near Veracruz, where most of it comes from. The land to a Mexican is extremely important in their life. It's really where their true life is about. The landscape is connected to this earth and this attempt to understand the Mexican people on one level because it is landscape. But it's interesting when you look at the landscapes, there are landscapes that have a kind of almost like a structure to them that is abstract but could also be the idea of fissures or plates moving against one another. And I think that that's what actually is operating on some level in his mind when he's painting these. You can find other landscapes that have an organic feel to the lines that almost look like human bodies lying on the landscape, like hills and mountains. He was seeing a story coming out of the earth. He was seeing a spirit in an energy coming out of the earth. Somehow we need to return to the earth to consider our relationship with it in order to develop the kind of spirituality that exists between those who survive on the earth directly like peasants, like the Mexican peasants who will take care and cultivate it because they know what it means for them. So his work became very interesting as a potential state about our need to understand that our relationship to the earth is fundamental to our species and that our search for our place on the earth is ultimately going to have to take account of that spiritual relationship that we have with the earth.