confessional retrospective photography

ROOM WITH TWO WINDOWS AND NO EXCUSES

The sunlight arrives before the housekeeping.

Laundry sits where sculpture usually wants to be.

A fireplace waits all summer with perfect confidence.

The walls are dark enough to make daylight look manufactured.

Everything is temporarily somewhere else.

“I’m Major Minor Melody. Creating art is essential to who I am—it’s how I process life, communicate what matters, and invite others into that conversation.”

STARS FELL ON CANDY KITCHEN

The painting called Stars Fell On Candy Kitchen looks like the night finally got fed up and puked its secrets onto a square of canvas. Everything’s writhing—colors snaking around like they’ve got dirty business to finish. You’ve got that busted-up ladder shape, the kind a drunk would try to climb to get out of his own life, except every rung is crooked and painted the wrong damn color. The whole thing feels like a map of a town where nobody ever tells the truth until it’s too late.

The speckled “stars” don’t fall gentle; they land like buckshot. They scatter across the surface like they’re after blood, lighting up the mess instead of redeeming it. The snake-path slithering through the composition has the arrogance of a bad man who never learned to keep it in his pants. It twists around the shapes like it owns the place, like it’s been getting away with it for years, leaving bruises that turn into art because that’s the only useful thing pain ever does.

There’s something honest and mean in it, the way good work is supposed to be. It doesn’t beautify a damn thing. It doesn’t apologize. It just tells you: here’s the wreckage, kid—try not to look away.

SIMON SAYS NOTHING

HOLDING PATTERN

The sky won’t settle but it won’t break either, just hangs there breathing slow, like it’s waiting for a sign that never quite comes. There’s a line at the horizon—soft, glowing, not a border but a feeling—like the moment before you decide something you can’t undo.

Forms rise up out of it, not quite land, not quite memory. Pink pushing through the quiet like a pulse, like something alive under the surface trying to remember its shape. The colors don’t argue, they circle each other, they drift, they hover—everything suspended, everything almost.

It’s not stillness. It’s suspension.

A place where nothing collapses and nothing resolves. Where you’re held just long enough to feel the weight of staying.

And maybe that’s the point.

Not to land.

Not yet.

The mythology available to me was Steinbeck.

The people who move me most aren’t the triumphant figures. They’re the drifters, laborers, migrants, people who survive without power. The people Steinbeck looked at and said, “These lives matter.”

I’d describe my mother as wanting more—wanting status, recognition, perhaps authority. Not just making art, but succeeding in a way her town could see and validate. My father was more reconciled to ordinary life. Less ambitious perhaps, but also less tormented by ambition.

And then there’s me.

My earliest aspiration was to be a hobo, a wino, a cabin squatter.

Most people would hear that and think it means a lack of ambition. But that’s not quite what i’m describing.

I am talking about freedom from hierarchy.

I never wanted to be the boss.

I never wanted to win the game.

I wanted to live outside the game.

That’s a very different impulse.

It’s also why Steinbeck feels so important to me. He dignified people who weren’t climbing. He found beauty in people who had no intention of becoming important. He treated the poor, the wandering, the broken, the oddballs, almost as saints sometimes.

My connection to art doesn’t come primarily from the art world. It comes from place.

Salinas. The fields. The coast. The wharf. Gardens. Artichokes. Migrant families. Dust Bowl history. Steinbeck.

My story is rooted in land and people more than in cultural scenes.

My life is as much Steinbeck as contemporary art.

I am from working-class migrant stock, uncomfortable with authority, attached to landscape, drawn to outsiders, making art while living on the economic margins, suspicious of status, and still looking for dignity in ordinary lives.

There once was a woman named Mel

Whose heart Galen rang like a bell

He came and he went

Then claimed good intent-

Now she’s got his whole tale to tell.

He sobbed on the phone from his bed

While she spun his words in her head

“I care” he would say

Then ghost her all day

Now she screams her own truth instead

She fed him with stew made with soul

And hoped for a love that felt whole

But he dodged the heat

And stumbled his feet

Now she’s back in full heart control

He whispered “you’re better than most”

Then vanished like yesterdays ghost

She lit up her stage

Spilled fire spilled rage

And raised her own glass in a toast

She told him “theres something that’s itchin’”

He flinched like a boy in the kitchen

Now she’s feeling gross

When it wasn’t that close

Just a ghost he keeps super-stitching

She cradled her uke with a grin

Strummed chords of pure chaos and sin

“You think you’re confused?

Well I’m done being used

So now let the heartache begin”

So here’s to the deep hearted dame

Who walked through the mess and the flame

She might still feel sore

But she’s nobody’s chore

And she sure as hell ain’t playin tame

He texted from deep in the loo

Said “I’m shaking and spewing for you”

She said “what a prince!

Too sick for a rinse

But not too sick to type Boohoo”

He whispered “I feel kind of vile,

Like I tracked in guilt by the mile”

She lit up a smoke

Said “you’re not a joke

But damn, I’ve outgrown this trial”

“I’m just too messed up “ he cried

“My spirit’s been crucified”

She rolled her eyes slow

Said,”then why did you go

The title came from a joke — something about a bridge, and a watermelon, and paint going the wrong direction. It made me laugh, but the painting didn’t stay funny for long.

It started out soft. Polka dots. Bright colors. Almost domestic. But it kept slipping sideways — like something fell apart in a cheerful room, and no one wanted to talk about it.

Now it feels like a surreal memory: a cracked window, a broken promise, and a watermelon trying not to drown.

I don’t know if it’s finished. But it told me to stop. So here we are.

amanita, ammo for short.