People With No Names, The Undocumented: #123

These are two 6" x 12" oil on canvas panels side by side.  Depicted are two women waiting to be fed in a deportee dining room run by the Jesuit ministry The Kino Border Initiative. Today, the Advent scripture readings include the story of Jesus feeding the multitudes with seven loaves and a few small fish.  Every single day this miracle of feeding the multitude, with compassion, happens just steps from the walled border between Mexico and the U.S.

Works In Progress #5

This is the beginning of a large painting where I am combining three different people who are doing the dishes after one of the two daily meals provided at the Kino Border Initiative shelter for refugees. I realize, more and more all the time, how important it is to stay VERY open for as long as possible. Painting and drawing teachers try to teach this, but we all want to "go in for the kill", make some kind of recognizable image, and show we have some competence. Let's face it...it is just so uncomfortable to dwell for any length of time in uncertainty, but that place, sometimes that dark place, is where possibility and beginnings exist.

People With No Names - The Undocumented #15

This is "Nogales Trinity". The two women in the back are some of the deportees who all help clean up after they finish the meal that the volunteers at the Kino Border Initiative have fed them. This woman in the front is talking about her family...her five children that she left with her parents in Guatemala. She has just learned that while she was walking across the desert to find work and care for her family, her oldest child died of Denge fever. Her parents did not want to tell her (lest she become even more disheartened) but her 10 year old daughter blurted it out to her over the phone. She began to weep as she told me.