The sighting of animals in their habitats is becoming increasingly more rare, yet their presence is evocative of the closer proximity to nature in which we once lived. Emerging nearly unchanged from the Eocene to fly over the Himalayas at altitudes of more than 20,000 feet, cranes have been observed by human communities for millennia. If we find them astonishing, it is in part because we recognize something of ourselves in their form and energy, expressed as much as the potential to transform our lives as to be transformed by our encounters with nature—or with art. As a subject for art, the crane is both continuous movement and living form. In preparing for my “cave-wall” series of paintings, I had traveled along the Silk Route and in Southeast Asia to research Buddhist cave paintings and to visit ancient temple cities. At times I retraced the journeys of 19th century "explorer artists" who had traveled as members of scientific expeditions. They were observers of nature who communicated the direct experience of far away places to the public through their art. Whereas these earlier explorer artists documented flora and fauna that had been unknown to the west, my crane and heron paintings are pitched between the more ancient view and those of contemporary sensibilities—the explorer mapping the correspondences that are suggested between the flights of migration and the landscape of human imagination. Between the experience of place and practice of Buddhism I became drawn to the idea of "Buddhist space". In this sense, the perspective of space in my paintings is described by shifts in color; the experience of overlapping habitats suggested by the lessening of boundaries as suggested in the physicality of paint; the interchange of ideas reflected by layers of paint that can function as a kind of strata. Where the paintings refer to the wide array of wetland and forest habitats, it is to suggest a natural ecosystem in which all life is interdependent.